It doesn’t matter who you vote for.
If the left doesn’t like what they vote to cut, they’ll just go to court and find a judge to order the funding reinstated. Then you the taxpayer have no choice but to pay dollars to groups or programs whose funding has been enshrined as a near-constitutional right.
Planned Parenthood is in court arguing that they have a constitutional right to state funding in North Carolina. The group says the cuts by the legislature amount to a violation of its free speech rights, or something.
None of the $212,000 that was anticipated from the state budget for those programs is used for abortions – and, by law, cannot be – but that is at the heart of the controversy. The organization is suing on several constitutional grounds, including that the General Assembly violated its free-speech right.
Planned Parenthood isn’t arguing that it has a constitutional right to the money. Rather, it contends it has a right not to be punished for advocating on behalf of women’s legal access to abortion.
Um, what is the difference? No, Planned Parenthood is absolutely trying to establish a constitutional, or near-constitutional right to funding. Laugh all you want, but if the president gets another term and another Supreme Court justice or two, constitutional rights to funding for just about anything you could think of could become a reality.
The left did it again this week with the state pre-kindergarten program for at-risk kids, which has been widely shown to be educationally ineffective. In some cases, children who go through similar pre-K programs at age four have actually done worse in school in later years than their eligible peers who didn’t attend the program. The state pre-K program just essentially had its budget cut nullified by Judge Howard Manning, who has been dictating educational policy from the bench for over a decade — and bankrupting the state in the process without achieving much in the way of results.
The governor then used the legal ruling to order state agencies to enroll all at-risk four year olds in the state who show up no matter what the cost, AND to go out and expand the program by hunting down more and enrolling them. And if the taxpayers can’t afford another $100 million? To heck with them.
We’ll just have to hike taxes.
The ultimate constitutional-right-to-funding court battle will be over Medicaid, and it will be nuclear. Medicaid will start bankrupting states (worse than it already has) around 2014 thanks to Obamacare, which enrolls half the free world in the program. Across the country you’ll see states panic over double-digit increases in their expenses for their share of the Medicaid costs. To fund Medicaid, broke states will have no choice but to cut funds for education, Planned Parenthood and other programs … oh never mind.
