“The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” wrote Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she said.
Read MoreThe most likely step now is a challenge of one or more of the school districts that are allowing public allotment money to be used to pay for private school tuition. The districts in Fairbanks, the Denali Borough and Mat-Su are among those allowing this to happen. The Alaska Supreme Court said it believes the Dunleavy administration argues that this practice is against the law.
Nothing in the Supreme Court ruling Friday can be read as an endorsement of spending public funds for private school tuition. In fact, the opposite is the case.
Read MoreThe conflict of interest demonstrated by the action and inaction of the attorney general may have led to the indefensible claim by the attorney general—that an allegation of unconstitutional spending by school districts is none of his business.
The statute the state is trying to defend came under scrutiny after the attorney general’s family publicized its plan for tuition reimbursement. “Thanks to Dunleavy’s 2014 statute, private schools have been added to the list of allowable vendors for parents,” wrote Jodi Taylor, wife of the AG and a leader of the Alaska Policy Forum.
Read MoreJust one more blog post, for the moment, on the school funding appeal to be heard by the Alaska Supreme Court Thursday at 10 a.m. Gavel to Gavel plans to cover it live.
But home school parents who intervened in the case—represented by the Institute for Justice in Texas and Virginia, and former Attorney General Craig Richards—claim they have a right to receive public funds to pay tuition at private schools.
Read MoreIn the myriad of conflicting and contradictory claims made by the Dunleavy administration over using public funds for private schools, one that stands out is the declaration that school districts may be violating the Alaska Constitution by allowing students to pay for private-school tuition with public money.
A violation of that nature should prompt action by the attorney general to force the school districts to stop, but AG Tregarrick Taylor has allowed it to go on. He is seriously conflicted over the issue.
Read MoreOne of the arguments that the Dunleavy administration is making to the Alaska Supreme Court this week is that the state has no control over unconstitutional spending by the school districts because the law championed by Dunleavy absolves it of responsibility and bans the state from applying other rules.
Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor claims that the state education department has no control over the districts on how correspondence school allotments are used, though the education department is free “to ask the attorney general for legal advice on how student allotments may be spent,” but that school districts are “independent actors for purposes of liability under state law.”
Read MoreAn educational organization is not necessarily an educational institution, according to the Dunleavy administration.
The league of state synonymists is pinning its legal hopes in the landmark school funding case on a flimsy claim that the words organization and institution are not interchangeable.
That’s relevant because the Alaska Constitution prohibits spending public funds at “any religious or private educational institution,” but it doesn’t say anything about public funds spent on religious or private organizations.
Read MoreEnough already with the hypocrisy of Sen. Dan Sullivan and fellow Trumpists on the border question.
Sullivan has one of his employees assigned to attack President Joe Biden on social media in the voice of Dan Sullivan, pushing a fictional portrayal of Donald Trump as a man with all of his faculties.
Read MoreDave Winfield hit 465 home runs in the Major Leagues. Before he made it big, Winfield spent two summers in Fairbanks for the Alaska Goldpanners. One of his home runs may have hit the roof of the Fairbanks Curling Club. Or it may have bounced in the dirt and hit the wall of the club. It doesn’t really matter.
In the words of Lew Freedman, “any Goldpanner history talk quickly turns to Winfield. His name comes up in the first paragraph. Whether he ever hit a home run off the roof of the curling club or not.”
Read MoreIn a March legislative hearing, the Dunleavy administration reported that 14 of the 31 jobs in the “member benefits” office of the Division of Retirement and Benefits were vacant.
This was the highest vacancy rate in the division, which has a total of 129 positions.
On April 1, the state said there was a delay of 3.5 months in processing retirement applications.
On Tuesday, the Department of Administration Commissioner Paula Vrana said the delay in processing has been cut to 8-10 weeks.
After publication of my blog post on this topic, a skeptical legislator contacted me to ask about reports that the 8-10 calculation only includes applications that have been officially entered into the system. I asked her to clarify if the backlog excludes the applications received by the state that have yet to be dealt with at all.
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