Three Cheers for the Supreme Court (and President Trump) for Abolishing the Education Department | The American Spectator

Newsmax ran their headline as follows: “Supreme Court Lets Trump Lay Off 1,400 Ed Dept. Employees.”

The story reported:

The Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to put his plan to dismantle the Education Department back on track and go through with laying off nearly 1,400 employees.

With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court on Monday paused an order from U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston, who issued a preliminary injunction reversing the layoffs and calling into question the broader plan.

The layoffs “will likely cripple the department,” Joun wrote. A federal appeals court refused to put the order on hold while the administration appealed.

Well bravo.

Let’s start with the obvious.

One can search the Constitution forever and a day, and there is nothing there — zip, zero, nada — establishing a federal Department of Education.

In contrast, take a look at the Constitution of my home state of Pennsylvania, and you will find this:

B.  EDUCATION

§ 14.  Public school system.

The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth. (May 16, 1967, P.L.1037, J.R.3)

In other words? Right there in the Pennsylvania State Constitution, in plain English, is the state Constitution’s green light for the creation of a state Department of Education. And on a personal note, I can attest that for years my late Mom worked in that department, toiling away for various appointees of the governor of the moment, who in turn appointed the Pennsylvania secretary of education to his cabinet.

In short? There is no rocket science here in Pennsylvania about having a state Department of Education. Those who wrote the state Constitution knew exactly what they wanted in the state government, and they explicitly wrote it into the Constitution. The result is that there is a considerable physical building in Harrisburg, our state capital, that houses a considerable workforce of bureaucrats — and yes, they are unionized — running the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Which is another way of saying that a federal Department of Education in Washington issuing rules and regulations about what the Pennsylvania department can or cannot do is exactly Big Government out of control.

It has quickly become a job factory for residents of the neighboring areas of Virginia, Maryland, and, of course, Washington D.C., with some sprinkled elsewhere around the country. Jobs that can be carried out independently by the various 50 states, as, for example, it is done here in Pennsylvania, per the specific instructions of the Pennsylvania Constitution.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but common sense dictates that there are, in fact, areas of the federal government that are needed. The Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury are four for sure, with others out there as well. (Like the relatively new Department of Homeland Security, a result of the 9/11 attacks on the homeland. An obvious addition.)

The real problem here is something maintained in this space before.

If a Congressman wakes up in the morning and realizes his 5-year-old kid has a runny nose, he/she goes into his/her office and has his/her staff draft a bill to create the federal Department of Children with Runny Noses. It passes Congress because, of course, who doesn’t want to help children with runny noses? Then, a 10-story building is built in Washington, thousands of new federal bureaucrats are hired to run the place, and, of course, they are quickly unionized. And so the tax bill of the average American shoots up again.

That, in short, is the reason and the way the federal Department of Education was created in the first place. President Ronald Reagan was on to this game and unsuccessfully pledged to abolish it. He failed.

President Trump is trying again. And this time, he appears to have gotten a green light from the Supreme Court.

Good for him! And three cheers for both President Trump and the Supreme Court.

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