The Kennedy compromise

Conservatives might be screaming the loudest, but Democrats made their share of concessions in the House and Senate education bills.

By Jake Tapper

May 21, 2001 | President Bush has been taking a shellacking from conservatives for giving up the farm to Democrats in House and Senate negotiations on his education reform bill.

Bush has been "making one concession after another to the status-quo left," in the words of Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. And Republican members of the House agree.

When the House bill was voted out of the Education and Workforce Committee earlier this month, six Republicans -- Reps. Bob Schaffer of Colorado, Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, Mark Souder of Indiana, and both Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint of South Carolina -- voted against it.

Shortly thereafter, conservative groups like the Family Research Council; Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family; Concerned Women for America; Eagle Forum; and the Independent Women's Forum all officially declared their opposition to the House bill, which, along with its Senate counterpart, is scheduled to come up for a final vote by Thursday.

Their problems with the bill? The elimination of both the private school voucher proposal and the "Straight A's" provision, which would give states more flexibility in their use of federal education dollars.

A closer examination of the two bills being hammered out in Congress, however, reveals a number of concessions that Bush and his team have been able to exact from Democrats -- agreements on matters that just last year Democrats were fighting against tooth and nail. As of yet, Bush has not received much credit for getting liberal stalwarts like Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., to go along with legislative proposals Kennedy opposed just last May, but nonetheless these provisions are part of the package.

While not as easily understandable as Bush's immediate willingness to cave on private school vouchers -- the congressional votes for which simply do not exist, Bush education aides insist -- two key conservative reform measures that Kennedy and most Senate Democrats have historically opposed are now set to be added to the Senate bill.

An amendment to be introduced this week will include a pilot Straight A's plan, which would allow more flexibility for interested states or localities to use federal funds in exchange for an agreement with the federal government on meeting higher standards for achievement. It will also contain some form of "portability" that will allow students to take some federal funds with them if they are trying to flee a failing school.

But that hasn't been nearly enough for conservatives. A White House education advisor expresses a curious combination of pride and frustration at the realities of the package, and at the criticism coming from the conservative wing of the GOP.

"Just last year, you couldn't get Kennedy to sit down to even talk about these concepts," the advisor says. "Now he's signing off on them."

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