A Tennessee Republican state lawmaker is arguing federal funds to feed school children from low-income families should not be accepted unless it can be proven that the program will increase test scores.
GOP Rep. John Ragan, who has a history of targeting school students from low-income households, told the legislature’s Joint Working Group on Federal Education Funding he was concerned about “tying ourselves to the federal government,” and inquired about the amount of “waste” in the federal program, according to a video clip posted by The Tennessee Holler. The Working Group’s purpose is to determine how the State of Tennessee can reject $1.8 billion in federal education funds. […]
I’m not too clued up on US-state politics so I may have missed something, but I don’t understand how that would be politically tenable for him. Surely the people of Tennessee would be immensely pissed off by their own representative turning down extra funding at no additional cost to his constituents? There can’t be any coming back from that.
It… depends. Some people are such single-issue voters, whether that is guns or hating the gays, that these things just… don’t register.
But that’s starting to change, because people don’t like to see their children hungry.
Republicans quite frequently do turn down federal funds when the President or the majority in Congress is Democratic. They turned down Medicaid expansion funds under the ACA, Indiana turned down federal funding to build high-speed rail (so Illinois got it instead, and the resulting high-speed connection between Chicago and St. Louis, taking in the state capital along the way, is just about ready), I know there are many more examples but those are the only ones I can name off the top of my head. Occasionally it makes some of their voters angry, but the single most important thing to remember in order to understand US politics is that Republican voters always vote Republican.
