AKLEG Day 43: 'Quit wasting our time.'

It looks like Dunleavy plans to blow up the education deal.

Good morning, Alaska. It’s Tuesday.

In this edition: The Senate approved the education deal passed by the House last week, sending it to a governor who seems eager to veto it after he didn’t get his questionable teacher bonus program. If the 56 legislators who voted for its passage stick together, it’ll make for an easy override. However, if the past is any indicator, GOP legislators tend to get cold feet when challenging the governor. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill seeking to redefine what “life” and “person” mean in an attempt to criminalize abortion.

Current mood: 🤨

‘If he decides to play hardball, I’ll be on his team.’

On Monday, the Senate approved the House’s changes to Senate Bill 140, the vehicle for this session’s education deal. It increases baseline education funding by $680 per student, increases funding for K-3 students who need help reading under the Alaska Reads Act, increases funding for home school students and creates a statewide coordinator position for charter schools. The original underlying purpose of the bill, internet upgrades for remote schools, is also still there.

While the legislation was hailed as a breakthrough for the Alaska Legislature, settling a contentious topic well before the halfway mark of the session, it appears that the governor isn’t going to let it be that easy.

In a statement posted to Twitter/X following the Senate’s vote, the governor decried the legislation, which would deliver the first substantial increase to baseline education funding in six years, as a continuation of the strategy “just spend more money” on schools.

“My initial review of the education bill is that it falls far short of improving outcomes for students. It appears to do the same thing we have done for decades — just spend more money,” said the governor, who last year saw his salary increased by 20% after replacing the entirety of the state’s compensation board. “It doesn’t support the Reads Act, it fails to improve access to public charter schools, and it does nothing to recruit and retain teachers. We can’t do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.”

It should be noted that the legislation quite literally includes funding for the Alaska Reads Act, which educators have warned lacked the necessary funding to deliver the reading interventions necessary under the act. And while the governor claims that the state has been shoveling money into schools, education is one of the few areas of the state budget that hasn’t seen significant growth under the Dunleavy administration. Under the same span of flat education funding—where the base student allocation has lost more than $1,200 in buying power to inflation—the prison budget has increased by about 40%.

Anyway, to many, the statement came across as a thinly veiled promise that he would block the legislation from becoming law, either by a veto of the bill or a veto of its funding during the budget process. On Monday, legislators were already bracing for that possibility, with some expecting the veto to come as early as the afternoon.

It looks like it may come today, with the governor set to hold a noon news conference.

Overriding a veto of the education bill has a lower bar than overriding budget vetoes because it’s non-budget legislation, requiring 40 of the Legislature’s 60 members to vote in favor of an override rather than 45 votes. Clearing either hurdle would be easy if all legislators who voted for passage of the legislation – 38 in the House and 18 in the Senate – voted to override, but that is far from a given.

Legislators fell well short of overriding the governor’s veto of one-time education dollars earlier this year, with many Republicans voting in favor of upholding the veto after voting for the funding last year.

On Monday, at least one conservative legislator who voted in favor of the bill seemed to welcome the possibility of the governor vetoing the legislation.

“If he decides to play hardball, I’ll be on his team,” said Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, during the Senate debate on the bill before voting in favor of the measure.

While the deal was hailed across the political spectrum, it appears the governor is fuming over a lack of his priorities in the legislation. Not included in the agreement is any money for the teacher bonus program that the governor has insisted is the panacea for the state’s education woes.

The governor’s pitch in place of an increase to baseline education funding is a program that would pay teachers between $5,000 and $15,000 for completing a year of teaching, depending on where they work. The program would have lasted just three years — with benefits only being guaranteed in the first year — and was pitched as a way to study whether paying teachers more actually matters for retention.

(Dunleavy and his allies have also insisted younger Alaskans don’t want a pension, such as the one that Dunleavy earned from his time as a teacher.)

In the single hearing that the House Rules Committee held on the bill this year, several teachers testified that they didn’t want a bonus, especially when other people in the school system, such as aides, tutors and counselors, would be left out. They said they wanted more stable and predictable funding and that the bonuses wouldn’t solve the ongoing problem of pink slips.

House Republican Rep. Mike Cronk attempted to include the provision via an amendment to the education bill last week. As a former teacher, he said the program would effectively determine whether paying teachers more is a good policy.

“This is an opportunity for us to say, hey, we value our teachers. We want them to stay,” Cronk said. “It could work.”

The amendment failed on a 20-20 vote.  

What’s next

While I’ve heard some people try to assure me that legislators will override the governor if he issues a veto, that would require several Republicans in the House to defy a particularly vindictive governor heading into an election year. You’d think that choosing between local school closures and the governor’s favor would be an easy decision, but legislators have never failed to disappoint.

Still, if things are thrown back to the drawing board, I’m not particularly confident that we’ll end up with anything by the end of the session.

By most indications, the governor has never been easy to negotiate with. Not only has he been less than transparent about what he wants, but it appears that his idea of a compromise is essentially “Give me what I want, and I won’t burn the house down.” That has been well illustrated throughout his time in office but is especially clear when it comes to the latest education bill.

The governor seems to be dead-set on his teacher bonus program and a state-led expansion of public charter schools but has not really meaningfully engaged on either, except for sweeping claims about how they alone will be the silver bullet for Alaska’s education woes. The lack of meaningful details on the charter school expansion has been glaring, with Dunleavy and Education Commissioner Deena Bishop claiming that issues like oversight and funding will all be resolved through the regulatory process once the Legislature gives them what they want.

That alone should raise red flags, given the administration’s penchant for inventing legal justification to suit its agenda.

‘Stop wasting our time’

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee on Monday heard almost unanimous opposition to Big Lake Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe’s House Bill 107, legislation that, despite his claims, could lead to murder charges for abortion providers.

The legislation seeks to skirt the Alaska Constitution’s privacy clause, which has been interpreted to guarantee the right to health care, such as abortion, by redefining what “life” and “person” mean in the criminal code. At a hearing last week, McCabe claimed that he’s simply trying to establish that life begins at conception.

“An abortion, for whatever reason, is between a doctor and his decision and a woman,” McCabe said. “It’s not the intent of this bill to send stormtroopers into an abortionist’s office. That’s not the intent of this bill. This bill … is designed to define life and person.”

The measure would update the definition of “person” to include “an entity that has the moral right of self-determination” and would define “life” as “the property or quality that distinguishes a living organism from a dead organism or inanimate matter, and that is manifest in the function of a metabolism, growth, reproduction, a response to stimuli, or adaption to the environment, each of which originates within the organism.”

However, Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore said the changes, as they currently stand, would allow the state to bring criminal charges against abortion providers and people who get abortions because they extend personhood to fetuses. He noted that there are existing laws criminalizing the death of an unborn child that have several exemptions for abortions but that those wouldn’t apply because, under the changes, the fetus would be seen as a person and not an unborn child.

“HB107 redefines a person to include a fetus, and as a result, those defenses that are currently found in the statute would not apply to a typical murder statute or an assault statute,” he said. “Does that mean someone could be prosecuted? I would tell you that the law would allow charges to be filed under the statute.”

He said it’s an entirely different question whether those charges could proceed under the established legal precedent. Still, he was firm that the legislation could lead to murder charges for an abortion. However, he did note that self-defense laws, which allow killing in the defense of another’s life, may be applicable.

Much of McCabe’s justification for the bill rests on century-old writings about pregnancy that claim the embryo is the active entity. At the hearing, he said the claims “underscores the passive role of the mother’s body” in a pregnancy.

Some of those writings were highlighted in his sponsor statement. That includes the 1868 “Criminal Abortion,” an anti-abortion book whose modern printings include a disclaimer that the authors’ motivations were “primarily racist, xenophobic and sexist,” driven by contemporary fears that whites would be overridden by Catholics, Jews and “inferior races.”

McCabe’s statement specifically claims that “Criminal Abortion” author Dr. Horatio R. Storer “is irrefutable: The life of the unborn human begins independent of the mother’s body.”

The disclaimer on the book notes that Storer and his co-author “were horrified by declining birthrates among Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry and the influx of immigrants, many of them non-white, Catholic and Jewish. In their minds, abortion in the non-immigrant community, which they attributed to modern fashion and feminism, was leading to ‘race suicide’ and a country overtaken by ‘inferior races.’”

The authors’ backgrounds were not mentioned at the hearing but were brought up during the public hearing, with several testifiers pointing out how the writings are not based on sound science but are warped by their religious beliefs.

“Your religious beliefs have no business determining whether or not I have access to health care,” said one testifier.

They heard a lot from survivors of abuse and rape, who said that their right to an abortion is critical to their survival.

“Abortion is a choice for women to make, not for anybody else to get involved,” said one testifier, who relayed a story about an abusive partner who raped her and beat her. “If we have to fight to survive and we’re prey for men like that, that’s not OK. We should not be forced to have a child that we cannot have.”

Other testifiers blasted the committee for even hearing the bill, warning that if this kind of legislation becomes law, then they’d pack their bags and leave Alaska behind.

But perhaps the final testifier put it best when they said, “Quit wasting our time.”

But wasting time is precisely the plan for House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Sarah Vance, a far-right Republican from Homer, who closed the meeting with a somewhat unusual declaration: “I look forward to delving into the science that defines life.”

It should be noted that science isn’t the domain of the House Judiciary Committee.

Follow the thread: Public testimony on House Bill 107.

Stay tuned.