Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced Friday that he will unilaterally override the reading and writing proficiency requirements of No Child Left Behind. “It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute told The New York Times. Hess called Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”
Duncan has never explained what legal authority he has for unilateraly rewriting federal eductiona policy, but he did tell reporters on a Friday conference call: “I can’t overemphasize how loud the outcry is for us to do something right now.”
But the outcry was equally loud, if not greater, for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to unilateraly ignore the debt limit. Almost the entire House Democratic Caucus and former President Bill Clinton urged Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment to override the debt limit. No matter how flimsy that claim was, at least that decision would have had a semblance of legal justification.
So why does Duncan get to ignore NCLB but Geithner had to obey the debt limit?
Or what about the War Powers Act? Or federal bankruptcy law? Or voter fraud?
How does Obama pick and choose which laws he does, or does not, have to follow?
