Ducey’s appoints notorious anti-public education figure to AZ Supreme Court

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Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com

Governor Ducey’s spokesman, responding to an EJ Montini column critical of his appointment of Clint Bolick to the AZ Supreme Court.

Ugh, what a week. My brain is so crowded with things to be irate about I don’t even know where to start, but I’ll go with waking up Wednesday to learn that Governor Ducey had appointed Goldwater Institute litigator Clint Bolick to the state’s Supreme Court. Bolick has no experience as a judge but a long history of attacking public education and public workers, as detailed in the Montini column sneered at by Ducey’s communications director. And, hoo boy, does Bolick take a dim view of workers’ rights in general!

Bolick has long been a huge “school choice” (privatization) proponent and a steadfast opponent of full public school funding. For years his Goldwater Institute has provided conservatives with fuzzy math-based inflated per-pupil spending amounts to enable them to obscure how much they have truly gutted public education. For example, here’s the howler the Institute peddled about K-12 spending when they worked to defeat the Prop 204 sales tax measure in 2012 (emphasis mine):

Arizona schools spend $9,233 per student when you add up all funding sources, a 9 percent increase from 2000.

Such unusually high dollar figures (most surveys put Arizona substantially lower) are the result of GI including every expenditure they can get their hands on – “lunch money, after school sports, adult night programs, adjacent ways (sewer & road repairs as a result of city maintenance), and other non-revenue dollars” – which the other states we’re compared with do not use in their calculations.

The bullshit-based defeat of Prop 204 cost the schools $1 billion. Of course, remember who else was a big Prop 204 opponent. I won’t speculate on whether the Bolick appointment was repayment or not. You decide.

It was especially unnerving to see the announcement of Bolick’s appointment the day after the legislative district meeting I attended Tuesday night, wherein we were told that Democrats were duty-bound to support Ducey’s state land trust grab, AKA Prop 123, because we don’t want to be seen as “anti-education”. This is obviously not a concern for Governor Ducey, who strongly broadcast his contempt for the education groups who signed on in support of Prop 123 with this Supreme Court pick. IOKIYAR!

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1 thought on “Ducey’s appoints notorious anti-public education figure to AZ Supreme Court”

  1. a nazi appoints another nazi whats new. don’t forget to thank fred duval for trying to appeal to republiscum instead of latinos.

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