The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is fed up with President Barack Obama and his administration. The 43-member caucus, led by Representative Maxine Waters (D-Ca), says that Barack Obama is not listening to the needs of African Americans on the important issues of the day. The nation’s first African American president, a candidate who carried 95 percent of the African American vote (versus 4% for his opponent) in the 2008 presidential election, is alienating the African American lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and the lawmakers are threatening to do the unthinkable, vote with the Republicans (GOP).
Rep. Waters suggested the CBC’s 43 members could vote with the GOP to scuttle a variety of Democratic bills if Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel don’t address what she thinks is a lack of understanding of the CBC’s wide-ranging goals.
If the CBC is serious in their threat to side with Republicans, they should start with the one program that has proven to help African American students in the nation’s capitol: the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
The Democrats in Congress, including all 43 members of the CBC, voted last February to phase out a program that gives low-income D.C. families a $7,500 voucher to remove their children from often dangerous and failing D.C. Public Schools and allow them to choose a safe and effective education for their children. Most of the current recipients are African American.
This program has been a terrific success and has given parents across the nation’s capital real hope that their children will have a positive future, as one DCOSP parent Carmen Holassie proclaims in The Heritage Foundation’s new documentary Let Me Rise: The Struggle to Save School Choice in the Nation’s Capital:
“I can see my daughter five or ten years from now not living on the poverty level that I’ve been through.”
She goes on to talk about her son, Ronald:
“Without that Washington Scholarship, my son Ronald wouldn’t be the way he is today. Now I can go to bed and sleep and say ‘Thank you, Jesus’ my son has a future, a positive one.”
This is a win-win for the CBC. They would be investing in the future of African American children, and providing parents, like Carmen Holassie a real hope that their children have an opportunity to succeed in America. The CBC would also be joining a growing movement of African American Democrat lawmakers at the state level who are proposing school choice legislation in their states.
The CBC knows that allowing parents to choose a save and effective school for their children is important, which is why 38% of CBC members have at one time sent their own kids to a private school, compared to only 8% of the African American population across America who do so. Joining with school choice supporters across the aisle to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program wouldn’t just send a message to President Obama and his Administration, but also to the entire country that when it comes to education reform in America, the CBC is standing with the kids, and not special interests.
As we reported yesterday morning, it now seems all but certain that the Obama Administration has abandoned our anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is a terrible decision that reduces NATO’s security, encourages Iran to proceed full speed ahead with its nuclear program, kowtows to Russian pressure, and stabs our Polish and Czech allies in the back, after they made the difficult decision to support us.
And now the administration appears to have added insult to injury. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany attacked Poland. That was seventy years ago. One of the most significant commemorations of the war will be held on September 1, 2009, at Westerplatte, Poland. Westerplatte is a peninsula near the city of Gdask, which was then known as Danzig. By the terms that ended World War I, Danzig was a largely German-populated Free City under the control of the League of Nations. Early in the morning of September 1, a German surprise attack launched from Danzig failed to overrun a small Polish garrison, which held out against overwhelming force for a week and inflicted hundreds of casualties. The battle is to Poland what Pearl Harbor is to the United States.
There will be many representatives at the Westerplatte ceremonies: the German Chancellor, the Russian Prime Minister, the British and French Foreign Secretaries, and many other foreign ministers or prime ministers. On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department could only say – with the ceremony only five days away – that the U.S. would send “an appropriately senior person” to be announced by the White House.
But the Polish press is reporting that the U.S. will not send a senior representative. Polish Radio quotes the Prime Minister of Poland as saying that “Some countries are not sending high-level delegations. This is true of the United States as well.” The head of the Prime Minister’s office stated that, because of the low level of the U.S. delegation, no American would be asked to speak, and added cuttingly that “I would not attach a great importance to the fact that one country will not be represented by a member of the current administration.”
This morning’s report from Poland that the U.S. representative will be William Perry, one of President Clinton’s Defense Secretaries, adds weight to the previous Polish reports. It is no comment on Perry’s record of support for NATO and for its Partnership for Peace program to recognize that, as an official who left office twelve years ago, the delegation he leads will be very junior compared to those from Germany, Russia, Britain, and the other attendees.
The nation most responsible for the liberation of Poland was Poland itself, which after four partitions and fifty years of German slavery and Russian bondage never abandoned the desire for freedom. As Winston Churchill rightly said, Poland was like a rock “which may for a time be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock.” The Vatican, led by Pope John Paul II, also has immense claims to the title of defender of Polish liberties.
But neither Polish efforts nor those of the Vatican would have availed without the support, moral and material, of the United States. The cause of Poland was particularly near to the heart of President Ronald Reagan, and the assistance he authorized to Solidarity was vital to its survival and, after years of struggle, its complete victory over the Communist and Soviet dominated regime.
And it was Poland’s resistance, more than that of any other nation, that cracked the will of the Soviets to fight for their eastern empire, and that destroyed any remaining belief in the West that Soviet domination in Eastern Europe possessed popular support or moral legitimacy. Poland paid a terrible price in this struggle: World War II began in Westerplatte, but, for Poland and all Eastern Europe, it did not end until the fall of the Berlin Wall, fifty years later.
If the United States does not send a senior administration figure to Westerplatte, it will be a shameful embarrassment, highlighted by the fact that the two leading statesmen there will be representing Germany and Russia. The occasion is significant, Poland has been an important American ally since the end of the Cold War, and the American absence is already being commented upon in the harshest possible terms in Poland.
Not every Pole was for missile defense, but everyone in Poland suffered from the war and its long aftermath. To refuse to pay senior tribute to them would be an insult, and will only be interpreted as a statement that the U.S., while it cares a great deal about Russian sensibilities on missile defense, cares not at all about Poland. Not only do we appear to have stabbed them in the back on missile defense and slapped them in the face over World War II, we have not brought them – alone among their democratic neighbors – into the Visa Waiver Program, a failure that will go far to lose us any chance of winning the friendship of younger Poles.
All of this is a fine way to keep on doing what this administration has already done far too much of: alienating our friends while kowtowing to our enemies.