Screen Caption of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) during ESEA hearing on HELP Committee

Though expected by Senate watchers to be a sideshow and forum for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to voice his criticism of the nation’s top education bill, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing today instead crystallized key provisions of the legislation meant to replace No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

That the hearing was held at all is unusual, since the bill up for discussion was voted out of committee  in October by a vote of 15-7. But an agreement was struck between Paul and committee chair Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to allow the Kentucky senator to learn more about the language of the bill under the condition he drop over 70 amendments proposed in an attempt to slow down its passage.

And while the co-writers of replacement bill, known as Harkin-Enzi, voted to push it out of committee in a bi-partisan fashion, both would like to see more added.

“This bill is not Mr. Enzi’s bill, and it ain’t mine either,” said Harkin. While Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) told the audience, “It is important to note that I do not support 100 percent of the bill we reported out.  I would have supported a much smaller federal role and far fewer federal programs.”

Witnesses were invited to participate in the round table discussion without prepared remarks, a more informal hearing than is typical of Senate meetings. Senators were also invited to ask questions, with much of the dialogue focusing on tracking teachers and their pay, improving student performance, and addressing high-needs pupils like those with disabilities and limited language skills.

Tom Luna, Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction, said the current bill “has kept the good parts of No Child Left Behind.” He likened the 2002 law to the film The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, – with the emphasis on data-collection showing the good, while the federal government prescribing benchmarks and end goals representing the ugly.

He stressed a state’s right to set up its own education accountability measures was a 10th Amendment issue, and in moving away from NCLB, Idaho is “more than willing and ready to hold ourselves to higher level of accountability.”

Still, with many state budgets squeezed, federal largesse helps programs targeting high-needs students stay afloat. But with that financial support comes expectations states will live up to standards articulated at the federal level. That reality prompted Charles Seaton, a teacher at Memphis City Schools in Tennessee, to tell the senators, “We need your money.”

Harkin-Enzi disavows most of the performance targets schools were forced to meet under NCLB mandates, known as Adequate Yearly Progress, or face consequences, and instead focuses on the worst five percent of schools per district.

Pam Geisselhardt, a gifted and talented coordinator at Adair County Schools in Kentucky, welcomes the increased state control of monitoring student output. “The term NCLB is demoralizing for us at this point…testing, testing, testing…we have no time to teach.”

But accessing a rich data set on student learning is important, the other panelists said. “Everyone says we assess too much,” quipped Amanda Danks, a lead teacher in Baltimore who works with special education students. “We assess ineffectively too much.”

Danks’ comment was reiterated by a few of the national thinkers on the panel.

Rick Hess, an education policy analyst at American Enterprise Institute, said, “It is not useful to try to prescribe models” unless they pertain to the lowest five percent of schools. And Luna, a critic of federal involvement in local education, said he would not oppose federally mandated teacher evaluations but would see a problem if the “federal government tries to define it or regulate it.”

Special education took up a significant portion of the two and a half hour hearing, but was limited to matters of assessment, as well, with some senators and panelists arguing allowing more students with disabilities to receive alternative assessments would demoralize the students.

Harkin-Enzi puts a cap on the number of students who could qualify for alternative assessments as one percent — a point of frustration for low-performing schools with many high-needs students whose test scores would factor into the school’s overall performance.

Perhaps the bill’s harshest critic on the panel is Wade Henderson, President and CEO of  The Leadership Conference. “We must look at our history: states have achieved what they have because of the federal role, not in spite of it,” he said. Countering Sen. Paul’s assessment of the hearing, Henderson argued federal involvement is not a philosophical question, but a “practical debate affecting real-live students.”

Groups as politically divided as The National Council of La Raza and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce side with Henderson. In a letter released today, nearly 30 organizations that seek greater accountability standards for students and teachers said they do not support Harkin-Enzi.

From the statement:

Federal funding must be attached to firm, ambitious and unequivocal demands for higher achievement, high school graduation rates and gap closing. We know that states, school districts, and schools needed a more modern and focused law. However, we respectfully believe that the bill goes too far in providing flexibility by marginalizing the focus on the achievement of disadvantaged students.

Last month, President Obama unveiled his plan to grant states waivers from No Child Left Behind, putting pressure on congress to come up with a reauthorization of the 2002 law, which has been due for overhaul since 2007. Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the chair of the House education committee, has stated he prefers to augment the nation’s top K-12 law with smaller bills.

The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president about who should and shouldn’t be on the staff, or what the staff should write, is fantasy. David has never seen the slightest sign of anything like that at AEI. He can’t have. He made it up. AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom. As for the reality of that intellectual freedom, I think it’s fair to say I know what I’m talking about. I’ve pushed it to the limit. Arthur Brooks is just as adamant about preserving that culture as Chris DeMuth was, and Chris’s devotion to it was seamless.

Meanwhile, Frum’s wife Danielle Crittenden fires at the critics of her husband:

We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate — once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up — prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.

There’s a lot about the story I don’t really understand. But the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under. AEI represents the best of the conservative world. [AEI President] Arthur Brooks is a brilliant man, and his books are fantastic. But the elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.

I’ve got a copy of Brooks’ upcoming political book, “The Battle.” It’s the kind of thing that will please donors, but it really presents no challenge to GOP strategy and rhetoric. Meanwhile, as Frum tweeted last night, AEI has retained Jonah Goldberg and Marc Thiessen — two big names in conservatism, but not two who have criticized the party for failing to work with Democrats.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

As job creation continues to be the caboose of economic recovery, employment experts of all stripes are hiking the pressure on Congress to tackle the crisis by encouraging employers to cut hours rather than firing workers. And more and more lawmakers are taking heed.

Seventeen states have already adopted so-called “job-sharing” programs, which encourage employers to reduce workers’ hours in lieu of firing them outright. The state government, in these cases, then steps in to make up a portion of the lost wages. Between 300,000 and 350,000 workers are participating nationwide, saving roughly 100,000 jobs that would have otherwise been scrapped, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research and a long-time supporter of the concept.

[Economy1] Yet that’s just a drop in the bucket relative to the 12-million-job crater the country is in, leading many economists — not all of them liberal — to push Congress for a much larger federal investment in job-sharing programs.

Kevin A. Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told lawmakers this week that such programs are among the most targeted and cost-effective ways to tackle the nation’s jobs crisis, which has left nearly one in five workers without a job or underemployed.

The concept is simple: Rather than laying off a few workers during lean times, businesses instead could spread the pain by reducing work hours for many. In Hassett’s example, if five workers had their hours cut by 20 percent it would prevent one worker from being fired at no cost to the company. And if Congress were to alter its policies surrounding emergency unemployment insurance, those workers could then access a portion of those benefits — in this case, 20 percent.

Workers benefit by keeping their jobs. Employers win because they don’t have to train new part-time workers. And states would gain because their share of the partial benefits would be less than they would otherwise have to pay.

“Right now the government only really shares in supporting that worker if you lay the whole worker off,” Hassett said Tuesday before the House Financial Services Committee, advocating for new stimulus spending that’s been attacked by the Republicans who invited him to testify. “By adopting job sharing, we could give firms an incentive to slow job destruction.”

The call is timely. Even as the nation’s unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent last month, the number of long-term unemployed — those without work longer than 27 weeks — jumped to a historic high. Economists are projecting not only that unemployment will rise later this year, but also that it will remain above 8 percent even two years from now — higher than the peak jobless rate in either of the last two recessions.

Hassett pointed out that the job numbers coming out of the Labor Department each month are net figures reflecting the difference between the millions of jobs created and the millions of jobs lost — a constant churning that he says represents a vital opportunity for lawmakers interested in reducing unemployment.

“There is already a massive amount of job creation out there,” he testified. “If we can slow job destruction even a little bit, then we will have set the stage for big increases in net job creation.”

Reducing involuntary job losses by 10 percent, Hassett estimates, would be the equivalent of adding 200,000 jobs a month to the economy. Job-sharing policies in Germany have kept unemployment rates steady, Hassett said, even while that country’s GDP has tanked almost as drastically as that of the United States. And an additional perk: job sharing would be particularly beneficial to black workers, Hassett said, for the simple reason that blacks are often the first folks to be laid off in tough economic times.

Congress is paying attention. Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) called Hassett’s proposal “very useful.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) offered to give him an extra five minutes to testify. And Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) called job sharing “a wonderful idea.”

“I turned to my staff and said, ‘Go draw me a bill that will do this kind of sharing, if nobody else has introduced that bill,” Watt said.

Turns out, the legislation is already out there. Bills sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) would provide more money to the 17 states already operating job-sharing programs, while offering additional funds to other states that choose to adopt similar initiatives. The White House, Baker said in a phone interview Wednesday, is supportive, though officials there seem intent to let Congress design its own jobs legislation.

Not everyone, though, is on board. Republicans, claiming that the first stimulus hasn’t done anything to help the economy, are near-united in opposition to another large spending bill — regardless of what it contains.

“I’m really surprised that we’re even debating the need for a new stimulus in light of our experience with the old stimulus,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus (Ala.), senior Republican on the Financial Services panel.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) agreed, arguing that the Democrats’ $787 billion stimulus bill was “a complete failure.”

“I’m not even sure that John Maynard Keynes would have [supported] that particular stimulus program,” Hensarling said. “And here we are contemplating another one.”

Testifying before the House panel Tuesday, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, carried another message, warning lawmakers that current interest-rate and deficit-spending levels leave policymakers will few remedies should the country slip back into recession. With that in mind, Zandi urged panel members “to be aggressive” in crafting more stiumulus measures.

“If we have another recession, we will have no policy response,” he said. “We have to err on the side of doing too much.”

While it may sound logical to have an economist examining the economic impact of regulatory changes, Steinzor points out that Lutter has made some rather bizarre and disturbing arguments, including that the economic value of each of a child’s IQ points isn’t really all that much, so regulation to prevent lead poisoning ought not be so strict.

Lutter argues in this fascinating policy paper:

Benefits to parents of lower lead levels in their children are much less than federal regulatory agencies’ estimates of benefits, which they compute as the expected discounted gains to children’s lifetime earnings. … I show benefits to parents are between $1,100 and $1,900 per IQ point gained, or roughly one-sixth of the benefits to children estimated by federal agencies. … This analysis suggests lead standards will redistribute resources from parents to their children, because the benefits to parents are less than the costs of the standards.

In other words, the economic benefit to parents of an extra IQ point in their child is not as much as the cost of implementing new regulations that reduce lead in the environment. As a result, concludes Lutter, “The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development should reconsider their lead standards.”

Although it’s not exactly surprising to see the government weighing the costs and benefits of new regulations, the economic valuation to parents of their children’s IQ points would surely, if made public, be quite controversial.

Steinzor notes that less than 24 hours after she asked Sunstein at a meeting whether he would be hiring Lutter, “perhaps by coincidence, AEI had pulled many documents referring to Lutter off its web site, including his biography.”

AEI is an odd venue for Flournoy for two reasons. First, she co-founded the most influential think tank of the Obama era, the Center for a New American Security. And second, AEI is the locus of neoconservatism, the ideology that, more than any other, encouraged the United States to ignore and under-resource the Afghanistan war during the Bush administration. The left is, I think it’s fair to say, decidedly unhappy with Obama today, and is comparing him to former President George W. Bush. Flournoy’s speech will seem to them something like the last scene in ‘Animal Farm.’

Chances are, Flournoy is speaking to AEI in order to solidify support for the war on the right, which has reacted generally positively to Obama’s speech, notwithstanding its deep antipathy to the president himself. Flournoy’s task will be to see how deeply she can entrench that sentiment and tamp down the rancor that the president identified as deleterious to the war. That puts the right in a box: how to support a war without bolstering Obama?

Some journalists have been pointing this out. Now, Ben Smith at Politico asks Cheney’s camp about the distinction, and this is the answer he got:

“As the vice president has said repeatedly, the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided critical intelligence that saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. The documents released yesterday demonstrate that conclusively. Anyone who doubts that hasn’t read the documents,” said the Cheney source.

Ben’s source is simply lying to him and daring the media not to point out the distinction. The documents do not say that the enhanced interrogation techniques provided critical intelligence. They say that detainees, some of whom were subjected to the techniques, at unspecified points, provided critical intelligence, and a great deal of that was of a historical nature. The CIA inspector general’s report specifically talks about the indeterminacy of the techniques’ effectiveness — at great and judicious length.

Don’t take my word for it. These are the documents Cheney asked the CIA to declassify to vindicate his position on torture. This is the CIA inspector general’s report. This is Cheney’s May speech at the American Enterprise Institute. (One conspicuous line from that speech: “People who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values.”) Read them together. It’s not a he-said-she-said matter.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey (WDCPix)

It’s been exactly one year since then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey proposed in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that Congress pass legislation declaring a new, expanded war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban — thereby granting the president the authority to detain indefinitely members of those groups anywhere in the world where they’re found.

That proposal from a lame-duck Attorney General never got very far with the Democratic-controlled Congress. But a year later, the country is still debating that exact same detention authority. And news reports suggest that President Obama may seek precisely the same sort of authority that Mukasey was talking about.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Although the Detainee Policy Task Force yesterday announced it was taking a six-month extension on its deadline to formulate the policy, reports from National Public Radio, The Washington Post and Politico have all quoted anonymous Obama administration officials saying the president intends to create or continue some sort of indefinite detention system for suspected terrorists associated with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whether through new legislation or mere “consultation” with Congress.

“There is no intent in the administration to rely on anything other than congressional authority,” one senior administration official reportedly told The Washington Post.

Whether that authority would take the form of an entirely new system of administrative detention outside the authority of the laws of war, as some have proposed, or whether it would rely either on the existing Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or seek a new authorization, is unclear.  The anonymous officials aren’t explaining (or don’t yet know) how the administration intends to go about solidifying its legal authority to indefinitely detain suspects without charge or trial arrested around the world.

The question arises because the Supreme Court, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, affirmed that the president does have authority to detain combatants arrested on the battlefield in a conventional war, which the United States was engaged in with Afghanistan at the time. Since then, lower federal courts have ruled that the United States can detain combatants who are members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. But it’s not clear if that authority would reach countries where there is no active combat — or if the authority described in the Hamdi decision  at some point runs out.

In attempting to answer that question a year ago today, Michael Mukasey, in a speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, said that Congress should:

acknowledge again and explicitly that this Nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans—soldiers and civilians alike. In order for us to prevail in that conflict, Congress should reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations.

Today, Obama — or at least members of his administration — appear to want something very similar.

“It’s hard to see how they would end up writing anything much different from what Mukasey proposed a year ago,” said Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. “And that was dead on arrival.” Although the issue was raised at congressional hearings, proposed legislation never received enough support even to get to the floor for a vote.

Last summer, Anders described the idea on the ACLU’s blog as “a multi-part plan to violate the Constitution” that would “give a president worldwide power to declare anyone a terrorist and hold the person forever – without ever charging anyone with a crime.”

Although it’s possible that Obama would have more sway with Congress than Bush did, the leaders of the judiciary committees in both the House and Senate have publicly opposed a preventive detention plan that would detain suspected terrorists that the president deems “dangerous” without charge or trial; the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have likewise expressed reluctance.

So could Obama really get new authorization for preventive detention? Or will he try to rely on the old one, and issue an executive order or presidential memorandum clarifying (or extending) its scope? One reason he might want to seek new authorization is that, as David Kris, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division,  recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the authority the Supreme Court acknowledged in Hamdi could eventually “run out.” After all, the laws of war only authorize detention for the duration of active hostilities.

Anders said that in his conversations with lawmakers on the Hill, he hasn’t heard of any proposed legislation being circulated. “No one I’ve come across so far has seen or heard anything from the administration about an indefinite detention proposal,” he said.

In an e-mail, Ken Gude, associate director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress, cautioned that new legislation could lead to far broader authority for indefinite detention than even Obama envisions.

“For me, the answer to this question decides the whole ball game — if they go to Congress, what will inevitably emerge is a broad preventive detention system regardless of what the Obama administration wants. If they rely on AUMF authority, then it can be much more narrow.”

From the AEI press release:

The Obama administration has made clear that defense spending is not a top budgetary priority either today or in the future.  And, indeed, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already begun a process of cutting defense programs that, if left unchallenged, will immediately impact the armed forces’ ability to protect the country and deter potential adversaries.

What would be the strategic implications of an overall decrease in U.S. defense spending?

It’s a good question, especially if by “good” you mean “stupid” or “irrelevant” or “ignorant” or “dishonest.”

The Obama defense budget raises defense spending from the final Bush defense budget. Gates’ shift in spending is designed not for a non-existent “peace dividend” — where does Cornyn even come up with that? — but to support the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to put defense spending on a sustainable and actual-threat-centric footing. By all means, argue Gates’ priorities, but this is just box-turtle-level reasoning.

The speech rather quickly dovetailed into an attack on earmarks. “I’m aware that earmarks consume a very small proportion of the budget,” McCain said. The reason to focus on them is that they’re “deeply, deeply offensive” to Americans who are tightening their belts.

McCain also argued that the GOP wasn’t a “party of no,” (they had proposed smaller, tax-cut focused stimuli) and he ruled out any attempt to to use the budget reconciliation process to pass health care, education, or environmental reform. Doing that would debase “the normal 60 vote requirement that makes the Senate the unique environment that it is.”