January, 2015 Update, Will the Center Hold: Common Core, Horrid School Lunches, Gun Control, and More

On a semi-regular basis, we run a discussion on whether or not “the center will hold?” In other words, what happens if and when Washington issues a law or a decree and the rest of the country simply ignores it, will the center hold? Never in my life have I seen the country so divided and struggling to push back on the over reaching politicians in Washington.

From gun control to school lunches to warrantless spying on citizens to Common Core education standards to health care to many other issues, states and individual citizens are more and more taking formal and informal action and telling Washington types to butt out of our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms. We have gotten to the point where state legislatures are actually passing legislation saying that they will not abide by certain Federal decrees and laws and making such compliance a crime within their state borders.

To review the many previous posts we have done on this question, enter “will the center hold” in the search box above to see the widespread resistance that is building up across the country. For the latest push backs against Washington, continue reading below and you decide: will the center hold?

1) One of the biggest issues that the rest of the country is resisting from Washington is the so-called Common Core education standards. Common Core seeks to impose one set of educational standards on every state and every child in the country, standards that are written by Washington bureaucrats. Needless to say, given Washington’s poor record of getting anything right, many states are having second thoughts of surrendering their education principles to Washington. 

The second major reason for resisting Common Core is that in states where it has already been deployed, test scores of kids in those states have declining substantially compared to test scores prior to the Common Core standards. Thus, logic says, why surrender to a set of standards that fail to accomplish what they promised and are substandard relative to the status quo?

The latest state to consider dumping Common Core is Mississippi. Recently, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant attended a stop Common Core rally in his state.

Bryant spoke at the rally: “We’re not here today to say take away those academic challenges. We’re here to say make them better but take them away from the control of the federal government.” 

He and other state politicians were present at the rally to try and pressure the rest of the state legislature to act and formally withdrawal the state from the Common Core program. Another state that might tell Washington to pound sand, this time as it applies to Federal educational guidelines.

2) One of the biggest rebellions against the Federal government has been against the new school lunch program guidelines that Washington implemented, and which were vigorously supported by First Lady Michelle Obama. These guidelines were supposed to make kids eat healthier lunches at school in order to combat childhood obesity.

Unfortunately, as we have reported many times, the program has largely been a failure since the kids are not eating the supposedly healthier meals that schools must provide under the Washington guidelines. While the food might be healthier, it does not matter if the kids do not eat it. Horror stories have been reported around the country of how putrid and/or tasteless the new lunches are and how they are just not being eaten. You can lead a kid to a healthy lunch but that does not mean he will eat it.

So much “healthy” food was being thrown out at one school district we reported on that they cut a deal with local hog farmers to use the thrown out food as hog feed at the farms. According to the Education Action Group website, at Rogers High School in Gers, Arkansas, much of the “healthier food was also being thrown out: “We’re feeding trash cans a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables,” Robin Kinder, president of the Arkansas School Nutrition Association and assistant child nutrition director for Springdale Public Schools, told NWAonline.com.

This high school had the following experiences with the new guidelines:

• The school forced students to take healthy food options when going through the cafeteria line but even forcing them to put the health food on their trays did not result in it being eaten, it usually just got dumped in the trash can: “It would just go straight to the trash sometimes,” Estefany Corleto, a junior at Rogers High School, says of the foods students are required to take. “I think it was just a waste of food.”
• According to Kinder, low-sodium and low-fat foods were not developed with kids’ tastes in mind.
• The low-sodium mashed potatoes, for example, were roundly rejected: “I have never seen children throw mashed potatoes away,” she says.
• Pickles can only be served with “certain meals.”
• As a result, the school managers found that food costs and garbage volumes were going up while sales were going down.

Another top down Washington program that made a current issue worse. Rather than kids eating more of less healthy meals, they are now eating far less of healthy meals, getting far less calories than they need to grow and thrive in school rooms and school activities. Healthy eating habits needs to be addressed by a nationwide, long term public health campaign and education effort. That is how you resolve the problem. Washington mandating a non-solution will never work.

This problem, like most problems, will not be solved by having faraway Washington bureaucrats and politicians trying to dictate what is on a kid’s lunch tray.

3) One of the more hotly contested issues that the country is pushing back against Washington is the effort President Obama has undertaken to bypass Congress and the American people and to unilaterally give amnesty and government benefits to millions of illegal aliens. Since the states are going to have to absorb the costs and burden of many of these illegal aliens, they are now pushing back, through the judicial processes to block this unConstitutional and illegal Presidential dictate.

According to a Heritage Foundation article written by Hans von Spakovsky on December 31, 2014, 25 states, half of the states in the union, have filed a Federal lawsuit to block his unilateral plan to grant amnesty. The lawsuit claims that Obama has “unilaterally suspend[ed] the immigration laws as applied to 4 million of the 11 million” illegal aliens in the United States.

The states are requesting that a judge find that Department of Homeland Security directives implementing Obama’s plan violate the "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" cause  of the Constitution, as well as various provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act because they are arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and were issued without regulatory authority or the required notice and opportunity for public comment.

Here are the 25 states involved in the lawsuit:

Alabama

Arizona

Arkansas

Florida

Georgia

Idaho

Indiana

Kansas

Louisiana

Maine

Michigan

Mississippi

Montana

Nebraska

North Carolina

South Carolina

North Dakota

Ohio

Oklahoma

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Half of the country thinks Obama and his administration are wrong when it comes to this action and are spending money and resources to push back on this clearly illegal action. Makes you wonder what will happen if Obama tries to force his will through anyway, regardless of what the courts say: will the center hold if half the country tells Washington no on amnesty? What would Washington do if half the states do not do what Washington wants them to do on this issue? Interesting times we live in.

4) One last piece of resistance for today. Earlier in 2014, the Idaho governor signed state government legislation would ignore and nullify all future Federal government gun laws. The legislation was passed unanimously in both the house and senate of the state legislature.

Erich Pratt, Director of Communications for Gun Owners of America, cheered the governor’s action. “By signing this nullification bill into law, Idaho has joined an elite class of states that are telling the feds to ‘get lost’ — especially when it comes to unconstitutional gun control infringements.” 

Specifically, the law will: “protect Idaho law enforcement officers from being directed, through federal executive orders, agency orders, statutes, laws, rules, or regulations enacted or promulgated on or after the effective date of this act, to violate their oath of office and Idaho citizens’ rights under Section 11, Article I, of the Constitution of the State of Idaho.”

The legislation continues to establish: “Any official, agent or employee of the state of Idaho or a political subdivision thereof who knowingly and willfully orders an official, agent or employee of the state of Idaho or a political subdivision of the state to enforce any executive order, agency order, law, rule or regulation of the United States government as provided in subsection (2) of this section upon a personal firearm, a firearm accessory or ammunition shall, on a first violation, be liable for a civil penalty not to exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000) which shall be paid into the general fund of the state…”

As a result of this action in Idaho, but related to the bigger issue of states and citizens fighting back against Washington overreach, Tenth Amendment Center executive director Michael Boldin said that the new Idaho law has opened Pandora’s box even wider: “People are beginning to realize that this practice is completely constitutional and legal. In the near future, you will see a wave of states passing even broader legislation to fight the federal government on everything ranging from more traditionally liberal issues like hemp and marijuana, to more conservative issues like Obamacare. Nullification isn’t a left vs. right issue. It destroys the fallacy of the left right paradigm and is the remedy for all unconstitutional laws.”

Just another day in the country's desire to get out from under the repressive and aggressive actions of an out of touch and incompetent Washington political class. Today we learned that Mississippi is just the next state to fight back against Common Core, the Michelle Obama dictatorial healthy school lunch plans are still failing across the country, half the country is formally fighting Obama and his forced and illegal unilateral amnesty program, and Idaho has joined several other states to proclaim they will not obey Washington gun control laws. Will the center hold?

Check back on a regular basis as we will continue to review this fascinating, if somewhat scary potential future, a future that may see the rest of the country decide what, if any, Washington actions it will obey or ignore.

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http://www.reason.com
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http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w