The House has voted down a proposal from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have nearly zeroed out the salary for Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Greene fashioned her proposal as an amendment to a bill handling funding for federal departments including the Department of Education.
In total, 260 members of Congress voted “no,” while just 165 voted in the affirmative. The “no” votes included 51 Republicans.
In remarks on the House floor promoting her proposed amendment, Greene raised familiar, right-wing complaints about supposed overreach in acceptance for transgender individuals — whose basic legitimacy of existence she denies. She also accused Cardona of a role in supposed targeting by the federal justice system of parents who merely expressed some potentially unpopular political positions around subjects including the wearing of face masks, which misrepresents the actual course of events. (There was no widespread targeting of parents on merely that basis. Actual threats to figures in education have been recorded. It’s not just advocacy!)
Greene also falsely characterized critical race theory as the promotion of “Black supremacy.” “Critical race theory is a destructive, racist ideology that promotes Black supremacy and teaches that America is fundamentally racist. It is not. He is now pushing the same CRT agenda across the Nation’s school system by attempting to implement CRT curriculum in schools and into the grant-making process. After enough pushback, he said that the Department will not dictate or recommend the curriculum to be taught in classrooms. However, the Department is still encouraging projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives in classroom instruction,” she told colleagues on Wednesday.
Is the mentioned diversity… bad? A lot of this spending legislation has been effectively stymied with the recent approval of a short-term extension of funding that pushes out the discussion again, this time to next year.
