State Superintendent of Public Instruction – and former Democrat State Representative – Randy Dorn said he is contemplating running for governor as an Independent. Dorn believes that “neither Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee nor Republicans are living up to their duty to fund public schools.” His candidacy would be “to prod Inslee and Republican challenger Bill Bryant on education funding.”
Bryant’s campaign argues that Dorn’s claims are simply untrue. Bryant is running on a platform to make fully funding education our state’s first and top priority— something that, unlike Democrats, GOP lawmakers in the Senate majority have proved over the last few years they could be trusted to do.
Dorn’s accusations concerning Inslee’s [failed] leadership on education certainly hits closer to the mark. Dorn said of our green governor, “If it comes to global warming, ocean acidity, carbon, he’s all-in no matter what. But it’s not the paramount duty as a governor to solve global warming.”
There’s no way for Inslee to dodge Dorn’s line of attack. Placing his extreme “green” agenda ahead of actual priorities is what Inslee has done his entire first term as governor. The Seattle Times points out,
“In 2015, Inslee tried to meld the issues of education and climate in proposing a cap-and-trade system that would have raised $1 billion a year by selling pollution permits to large carbon emitters. A portion of that money would have been devoted to schools. The plan died in the Legislature.”
Democrats do not place K-12 funding at the top of their list of priorities. As Shift will continue to point out, even if the mainstream media will not, it is Democrats who have underfunded public education and higher education spending for a generation.
Democrats have controlled at least one house of the Legislature in 30 of the last 32 years – and had complete control of the Legislature in 14 of those years. A Democrat governor has signed every state budget since 1985. Under these heavily Democrat-controlled budgets, new spending for bigger state government has outpaced new education spending by a 2-to-1 ration.
The fact that Jay Inslee followed the trend set by his party predecessors, holding public education spending hostage to other big-government priorities, should come as no surprise. Inslee’s first priority was, and remains, his extreme “green” agenda.
