I fully share Charlie’s enthusiasm for the word “No” in politics. “We would be better off if more of our contemporary politicians were to embrace the healing power of ‘No,'” he writes, and I couldn’t agree more.
As Charlie notes, though, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro didn’t have to say “No” to any particularly strong interest group with his opposition to removing a statue of William Penn from a park. “Nobody really likes this stuff; it is the preserve of a tiny, insulated elite. One could spend years trawling the highways and byways of Pennsylvania and find literally nobody who wanted to cancel William Penn.”
Last year, Shapiro had the chance to stand up to one of the most important institutions in American politics to say “No” to: teachers’ unions. He caved.
When the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania senate included a school-choice program, the Lifeline Scholarship Program, in its budget last summer, the Democratic-controlled house of representatives refused to pass it. Democrats’ majority in the house was one seat. One Democratic senator had voted with all the Republicans to pass the budget. Shapiro needed to flip one vote in the house.
He had said before he was elected and after he was elected that he supported the school-choice program. His education secretary said the same. But, as NR’s editors wrote at the time:
When it came time to actually take a stand, Shapiro did what a typical Democrat would do: He sided with the unions. The Pennsylvania affiliates of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council ganged up on Shapiro and released a letter denouncing the school-choice program.
Shapiro announced he would resolve the budgetary impasse by line-item-vetoing the Lifeline Scholarship Program, despite saying that he still supports it.
It’s easy to say “No” to nobody. It’s much harder to say “No” to teachers’ unions that have considerable power to end Democrats’ political careers if they don’t do what they want. If Shapiro had the fortitude to say “No” to teachers’ unions and persuade his own party in the legislature to allow the Lifeline Scholarship Program to go through, more Pennsylvania students from low-income households would have access to school choice today. He didn’t, so they don’t.