"Texas already long ago sued the federal government about having to incur the costs of the education program, in a case called Plyler versus Doe," Abbott told conservative radio host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo during a phone interview. "And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue. ... I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler versus Doe was issued many decades ago."
Co-founder of Sister District, Gaby Goldstein, joins The Downballot to discuss what Democrats in the states are doing to protect abortion rights
Plyler v. Doe was a 1982 landmark decision making it unconstitutional to deny any student a free public education, whether the student is undocumented or not.
“By a 5-4 vote, the Court found that any resources which might be saved from excluding undocumented children from public schools were far outweighed by the harms imposed on society at large from denying them an education,” the American Immigration Council website reads.
But for Republican lawmakers such as Abbott, going after the rights of undocumented students to have an education isn’t really the point for the GOP. The point is to go after public education in general. Conservatives are using buzzwords such as “CRT,” “grooming,” and “social-emotional learning” in an attempt to dismantle public education in favor of vouchers for charter schools, religious schools, or private schools.
Conservatives are taking many of their policy cues on schools from a small southern Michigan Christian school called Hillsdale College. It is quite literally at the epicenter of book banning movements, anti-vaxxer and CRT communities, climate-science deniers, and Republican legislation.
Hillsdale College offers school boards and right-wing policymakers a template for conservative curriculums and attacks on liberalism. The institution espouses that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a hoax and that, according to outstanding reporting from Salon, Russian president Vladimir Putin is a “hero to populist conservatives around the world.”
Reversing Roe v. Wade is an attack on reproductive rights, but more than that it’s a gateway drug for a conservative, rigid, and uneducated nation under extremist minority rule.
As for Roe’s reversal as a bellwether for more challenges? Columnist with The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, dismissed any notion that the landmark civil rights decision Loving v. Virginia could be next, tweeting: “Similarly, it is not 1950. In Georgia, 13-14% of Atlanta and Augusta couples are now interracial! Even in the Deep South, outlawing interracial marriage would be a lift… But also, is Clarence Thomas going to vote to let states outlaw his marriage?”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that “gay marriage” and “civil rights” might be next up on the Court’s reversals.
The day after the leak went public, Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar tweeted that if Roe is overturned, the next “predictable” steps would be a “roll back rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual privacy, and the full array of textually unenumerated rights long taken for granted.”
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