Senate Majority Leader Jim Mehlhaff is speaking to the media in an article at South Dakota Searchlight today, and is noting that the Senate has no appetite for education savings accounts this year:
Based on discussions with the governor, Mehlhaff said, “we decided we just don’t want to go down that bunny trail over in the Senate this time.”
“We’re going to move on to other priorities,” the majority leader said during a legislative leadership press conference on Thursday at the Capitol in Pierre.
and..
Support within the Senate Republican caucus is slim, Mehlhaff said.
“There was zero love for it,” Mehlhaff said, citing budget constraints and competing priorities. “We’re cutting PBS, we’re cutting the state library, we’re cutting maintenance and repair on our public buildings, we’re cutting veterans service officers — we’re cutting all over the place.
This might be one of the weirdest sessions I’ve ever seen with legislators’ unnatural fetish towards schools with a group of legislators who claim they favor local control but whose actions illustrate anything but; 10 commandments in classrooms, shoving religious chaplains down their throats, trying to place ceilings on what they can pay key employees. It’s as if they just want to send a list down, and tell districts how they believe we should run our schools without ever having walked in their shoes.
The fact that there’s little appetite in the Senate for taxpayer dollars going to private schools gives some hope that the madness may come to an end. But, we still have a number of days to go.
It’s clear the wackadoodles including the Doeden Dumpster Divers do not have the ability to govern. Anyone surprised? Given they are unable grasp what their real purpose is to put in the time, focus on priorities of doing the hard work they take the easy route. The easy route that takes basically no effort is the good old distractive culture war bills. Ready made from some out of state hard right bill factory. The 10 commandments bill, School Chaplains, bathroom bill, birth certificate bill, school counselor bill and others.
Might as well phone it in the rest of this session and next which would save South Dakota taxpayer dollars until 2026 when they are replaced.
This group is all ‘local control’ as long as you control how they want you to. If your ‘local control’ is different from their ‘local control’ they’re ready and willing to chuck your local control out the window and control you by shoving their opinion down your throat
It’s self righteous hypocrisy
Great news.
It is interesting that those who champion “less government” rarely follow that mantra when they become part of the government.