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Democrats and public education advocates are urging Gov. Doug Ducey and his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature to keep their promise to lift the states annual school spending cap.

Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature together passed a budget in June that dedicated more than $600 million to new, permanent funding for K-12 education. However, if two-thirds of the legislature doesnt vote to lift the states Aggregate Expenditure Limit, or AEL, districts across the state wont be able to spend around $1.3 billion already allocated to them.

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Many Democrats in the Legislature say they only voted in favor of the budget because Ducey and the Republican legislators promised they would later call a special session to lift the limit.

If Democrats can prove they have the votes to override the AEL, Ducey will call a special session, said C.J. Karamargin, communications director for the governors office.

What is the point of giving our public schools money but not allowing them to spend it? asked Sen. Christine Marsh during a press conference Thursday. Its a betrayal of our students and our schools. Its also a betrayal of the legislators who voted for a less-than-ideal budget under the promise that there would be a special session to address the AEL.

Voters added the AEL to the Arizona Constitution in 1980. It implemented a shared monetary limit based on the spending and enrollment at all public school districts in the state, according to the Arizona Education Association. Once districts reach their shared limit, they can do no more spending in that fiscal year.

Advocates pointed out on Thursday that the AEL predates laws requiring sometimes costly accommodations for special education students as well as expensive technology that is now used in many classrooms.

A small group of legislators and education advocates gathered for the press conference on the state Capitol grounds in Phoenix on Thursday morning to call out Ducey and legislative Republicans for their failure to schedule a special session.

If the AEL isnt lifted for 2023, school funding will drop off April 1 and districts will be unable to spend more than $1 billion in money they were given.

According to Marsh, who is a teacher at Scottsdale Unified School District, her district stands to lose around $28.4 million if the limit isnt lifted. Chandler Unified School District stands to lose $62.4 million, Phoenix Union High School District would lose $52.6 million and Tucson Unified School District would lose $66.1 million

This comes down to kids, and they deserve to know that their state cares about their education, Marsh said. And right now, they dont know this.

Failure to lift the limit will result in teacher layoffs, larger classroom sizes and poor learning outcomes, Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman said during the press conference.

Sierra Vista Unified School District, located southeast of Tucson, would have to reduce its average teacher salary from $50,000 to $35,200 if the limit stays in place, Hoffman said.

How are schools supposed to obtain highly qualified teachers for only $35,000 a year? Hoffman said.

The spending cap might also mean fewer paraprofessionals to assist special education students, and fewer counselors, behavioral coaches and school nurses, she said.

Democrats said they agreed to approve the state budget in June without addressing the AEL as a concession to Republicans who wanted to wait for a judgment in a court case challenging Proposition 208, also known as the Invest in Education Act. The voter-approved measure would have provided millions in funding for schools through a 3.5% surcharge on all income greater than $250,000 for individuals or $500,000 for joint filers.

But the judgment calling the act unconstitutional and the following appeal period are now long passed, and Democrats say its time for Ducey to call the promised special session.

Democrats are confident that, if Ducey does call for a special session, they have the votes to lift the spending limit. The state education budget passed in June with 48 votes in the House and 21 in the Senate, more than the votes needed to lift the limit, said House Democratic Leader Reginald Bolding.

But Karamargin countered that Democrats havent supplied the governor with a list of Legislators who are on board.

Well consider it as we said we would, he said.

Those who supported that budget should support lifting the limit so that money can be spent, Bolding said on Thursday. He believes that anyone who changes their vote was playing political games or being dishonest.

Karamargin believes Bolding was making assumptions when he said that those who voted for the budget should support lifting the AEL.

The Legislature voted in February to lift the AEL for the 2022 fiscal year, which ended June 30. The proposed vote would be to lift it for 2023.

***This story has been updated to include comments from the governors office.

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Democrats urge Republicans to keep promise, lift cap that will stop schools from spending $1 billion - Arizona Mirror

This week has been difficult for those of us who want to see a fully democratised, 21st-century polity that doesnt have a hereditary billionaire as its head of state. Everything from the gratuitous wall-to-wall media coverage to the arrest of anti-monarchy protestors and the state-sanctioned cancel culture of those who dissent has laid bare the fact that this transition is as much about coercion as consent.

But, strangely, these acts have not been the most difficult thing to reconcile in this tumultuous week. Instead, it has been watching the livestream of tens of thousands of fellow citizens from all walks of life, quietly queueing for up to nine hours to file past a coffin while bowing and curtsying. My initial response was one of bemusement followed by a touch of despair. Why, I asked, would so many people, often with so little, show such deference to an institution that is the very embodiment of the inequalities of wealth and power that permeate our country? Because until republicans can fully understand this sentiment, we will struggle to win the argument for transition from constitutional monarchy to constitutional democracy.

To gain that insight you need only listen to the same people interviewed, almost continuously, on television and the radio about why theyve attended. People are clearly moved, with some in the queue talking about their parents deaths or, more commonly, about wanting to be a part of history. Thus, many are not there to honour the institution of monarchy or a royal individual; what is prevalent is the expressed need to feel part of something more than themselves.

So how can democratic politics fulfil that function instead? If we think about our current political class replacing monarchy, that is clearly not the answer. How many prime ministers in the past 50 years would you queue up to pay final respects to? Probably not that many. But therein lies a fundamental truth about the institution of monarchy it is a distraction. It is a spectacle exalted for exemplifying virtues that should be typical in public life and public behaviour. Casting such behaviour as exceptional allows the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and the economic elites they represent to break and exploit the rules for their own benefit and that of their very narrow class interest of which the monarchy is an integral part.

For half of Queen Elizabeth IIs reign, our common life was destroyed by the privatisation of water, energy, public transport and council housing, by the desecration of our land through fracking and sewage in rivers, and by the despoliation of our common wealth in the selling off of childrens and elderly care homes to private equity groups. This all took place without so much as a royal murmur of disapproval.

Yet, at the same time, the royal family managed to exempt itself from more than 160 different pieces of legislation for its own economic advantage, such as the waiving of the 40% inheritance tax on the crown estates estimated 15.2bn of royal assets.

So while republicans should respect the language of duty and sacrifice monarchists have so forcefully claimed that the royal family makes on our behalf, we should not pretend that the reality is anything other than a lie. That is not what monarchy is. It may provide a symbolic way for us to recognise other peoples sacrifice and commitment to society but the monarchy itself risks nothing and does not suffer, save for having the lives of the royal family become the stuff of celebrity gossip. Through it all, it remains the backbone of a power structure that traces its roots back to feudalism.

The idea of divine and indivisible sovereignty embodied in the monarch has been passed on to parliament. There it continues to legitimise the power of a close-knit elite community resistant to the fact that in a complex modern society all of us have a stake, and all should have a voice.

If you doubt this cultural trickle-down and its replication in the fabric of our social, political and economic life then simply look at the schools our King, his sons and the leaders of industry and finance attended. Eton, Harrow, Westminster the training camps for the next generation of generals, captains of industry and prime ministers. Perhaps in a genuine democracy, our legislature could offer real checks and balances against such hereditary power. Yet more than half our legislature remains not just unelected, but increasingly distinguished only by having helped to fund the party of hereditary privilege the Conservative party. Another 92 directly inherited their exalted positions.

If we as a country are to move away from the constant democratic gaslighting of this political class, we must make constitutional, democratic reform a political priority. It isnt a sideshow to be relegated behind the NHS, the energy crisis or climate issues. Discussion of the monarchy, our politics, our constitution, is something to be vigorously aired, not shut down or even temporarily suppressed.

In a UK that needs such deliberation, my own party would be wise to give expression to such democratic sentiment.

But as weve seen this week, republicans must also offer something that goes beyond the material technicalities of politics and governance. Sacrifice, timelessness and ritual need not be bound up in ermine and gold. We glimpsed that most recently during the pandemic. The sense of belonging, of something shared, the clapping for those who risked their lives who sacrificed for all of us. This is good politics; politics that demands of people that they sometimes act and feel in a way that goes beyond themselves and which is connected with the past and future of our society and community.

Perhaps a republican head of state could be regularly chosen from those who display these qualities. People who put their lives on the line such as the military and firefighters, but also people who commit in other ways like nurses and teachers, who give up their time to kids whose successes they may never live to see.

The British people have never, through democratic means, been given the chance to try something different and approve or reject constitutional monarchy. Instead, those who have exercised their so-called democratic rights have been shut down, intimidated or arrested.

Observing this I was reminded of a Chinese media student who shadowed me while I was a BBC reporter. During one conversation, I mentioned the massacre of Tiananmen Square. She hadnt heard of it, so I showed her John Simpsons now famous report on the tragedy. She watched it. Then she said: Yes, this is probably true. But then Im fully aware of the nature of the regime I live under. But you? You delude yourself you live in a democracy. So whos the bigger fool? She was right. It really is time for us to wake up and understand the flawed reality of the very limited democracy we inhabit.

Clive Lewis is the Labour MP for Norwich South

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Amid the mourning, we republicans should look and learn but we must not be silenced - The Guardian

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in late August found that 67 percent of U.S. adults think the nations democracy is in danger of collapse. That is what President Biden said in Philadelphia, many of you would respond, when he called out MAGA Republicans for an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

But in the Quinnipiac poll, Republicans were as likely as Democrats to say that democracy is in trouble (69 percent of each party, and 66 percent of independents). In fact, large majorities of every demographic groupno matter the age, gender, race or education levelagreed with this dire assessment. Does this mean we have achieved a consensus without realizing it?

Unfortunately, no. The more convincing explanation is that Americans are so divided in how they define democracy that they can reach the same conclusion for radically different reasons. So after Mr. Biden said that supporters of Donald Trump promote authoritarian leaders and fan the flames of political violence, many Republicans countered that it was Mr. Bidens speech that was a threat to freedom (as if Mussolini and Hitler got together, as Donald Trump Jr. put it).

[Related: Why Bidens speech on MAGA Republicans failed.]

Based on how different candidates in this years midterm elections talk about our political system, I can see four distinct definitions of American democracy. All of them will still have adherents after November, but the election results may give one or more of them momentum toward the next presidential election.

1. Democratic Party democracy. The Democrats are now pretty much united on what makes a functioning democracy, which was not always the case for the political party that was once strongest in the Deep South. Todays Democrats want to make voting as easy as possible, and they support the one person, one vote principle that says each vote in an election should be of equal worth, and each citizen should have equal representation in government. They generally want government to be quicker in responding to the demands of voters and responding to crises like gun violence and climate change.

And, as of now, they also support the principle of majority rule. This principle became more popular among Democrats after they lost two presidential elections despite winning the most votes, but there has been ambivalence about it. Many civil rights leaders opposed run-off primaries when they had the effect of knocking out Black candidates who could only win pluralities, and many supporters of Bernie Sanders were fine with the idea that he could get the Democratic nomination in 2020 by getting only a plurality of primary votes in a crowded field.

2. Traditional Republican Party democracy. Think of people like Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol here. Republicans have traditionally favored democracy with guardrails; that is, they dont want government acting too hastily in response to public opinion, and they worry about mob rule and a tyranny of the majority eroding individual rights. They dont always support the strict application of one person, one vote, and they defend the rules of the U.S. Senate, including the filibuster, as preventing more urban and populous states from dominating national government (though there is no equal mechanism to prevent a rural majority from dominating national government).

In normal times, Republicans would oppose Democratic Party attempts to maximize the power of the majority through such reforms as abolishing the Electoral College, expanding mail-in voting, and giving statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. But this year many never-Trump Republicans are allied with the Democratic Party because, as Mr. Kristol puts it,

If we dont have two reasonably healthy parties, the unhealthy party has to be defeated.

The results of Republican Party primaries over the past six years, including the defeat of Ms. Cheney in her congressional primary in August, make it clear that traditional Republican champions of democracy are on the defensive within their own party.

[Related: Liz Cheneys ouster from Republican leadership is bigger than politics. Its a fundamental attack on truth.]

3. Stop the steal democracy. Most Trump Republicans do not agree that the Democrats are defenders of democracy. Mr. Trump himself, along with hundreds of Republicans running for statewide office this fall, claim without proof that President Bidens victory in 2020 was stolen or rigged. On the surface, they support the small-d democratic process in the United States, but their insistence that certain election results cannot be trusted inevitably erodes confidence in the legitimacy of all elections. (Some Democrats say that certain election laws, such as purging people from voter rolls when they miss elections, have led to unfair election outcomes, but very few have questioned the counting of ballots or the validity of official election results.)

The stop the steal movement does have various remedies for what it sees as a corrupt system. One is to give state governments the power to accept or reject election results (the thinking behind the attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to nullify Mr. Bidens victory); similarly, there is an effort to get the Supreme Court to rule that state legislatures should have the sole authority to set election rules. Another strategy is to more tightly control voter participation by imposing ID requirements and registration deadlines, limiting the times and places where one can vote, and challenging the validity of individual votes as they are cast. Along with the prosecution of rare voter fraud cases even when fraud does not seem intended, these efforts could have a chilling effect on voter participation, but maximum voter turnout is not a goal of stop the steal partisans. Tellingly, 67 percent of Republicans in a Pew Research Center poll from 2021 said that voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited; only 21 percent of Democrats agreed, with most saying instead that voting is a fundamental right for every citizen and should not be restricted.

4. A republic, not a democracy (with an emphasis on the second part of the phrase). A smaller number of Republican and independent candidates say outright that democracy is not always a good thing, at least at the national level. (They may think it is OK at the local levelas in neighborhoods deciding what kind of housing is permitted, or parents deciding on a school districts curriculum. Call it subsidiarity without solidarity.)

Some think the problem is that voters ask too much from the government, and thus give the government too much power to tax citizens and regulate behavior. Democracy is a soft form of communism that basically assures bad and dangerous people will be in power, said Jeremy Kauffman, a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire, in an email interview with the Boston Globe.

But some voters in both parties seem to be disenchanted with democracy because it results in a government that is too weak. In an Axios/Ipsos Poll conducted in early September, 33 percent of U.S. adults (including 42 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats) agreed that strong, unelected leaders are better than weak elected ones. For years, Mr. Trump has echoed this sentiment by praising and even seeming to envy anti-democratic leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and this year he seemed to get carried away in a conference-call rally with the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts. Geoff Diehl will rule your state with an iron fist, Mr. Trump told residents of the state that brought us the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill, and hell do what has to be done.

Attacking democracy is a dicey strategy for winning elections, so most Trump allies running for office this year maintain that, yes, democracy is a good thing (even if they think it is easily corrupted). But there are occasional statements to the contrary.

Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, controversially tweeted that were not a democracy in 2020, adding We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that. A spokesperson for Mr. Lee said that the senator was merely advocating republican checks on democratic passion, but the tech mogul Peter Thiel, a major donor to Republican candidates, has been more blunt, once writing for the libertarian Cato Institute that I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

There is a big difference between grousing about democracy and actively trying to replace it with another form of government. Its also uncertain that there can be a lasting alliance between those who think democratic government is too strong and those who find it too weak. But the lack of consensus on what democracy is, and on what it should be, could end up doing away with democracy altogether.

[Read next: Abortion, student loans and the Republican weakness for nostalgia.]

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Republicans and Democrats agree that democracy is in trouble. They just don't agree on its definition. - America Magazine

Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, and they have the nerve to claim that this is a compromise. This week, Senator Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, introduced a bill to ban all abortions everywhere in the United States at 15 weeks. Abortion is already banned before 15 weeks in 15 states.

It is banned outright in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Indianas ban on abortion went into effect just this Wednesday. It is banned at six weeks in practice a total ban in Georgia and Ohio. West Virginia passed an abortion ban, too. It wont be the last.

The Republican national 15-week ban that Graham has introduced will do nothing to help the women in these states, who will not have their rights restored. Its not a floor for abortion legality: it is a ceiling. The goal is to ban abortion in blue states. Currently, 58% of American women of childbearing age live in states that are hostile or extremely hostile to abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Republicans want to raise that to 100%.

One way that we know that the Republicans will ban abortion nationally as soon as they get the chance is because they keep saying that they want to. This is the sixth time Graham has introduced a national abortion ban bill. The previous five were, by his standards, less extreme: they all banned abortion at 20 weeks. That Graham has pushed his ban back earlier in pregnancy is a sign of the rapidly lowering standards for American women.

Were now told that 15 weeks is a compromise. But 15 weeks is not a compromise. It is the very beginning of the second trimester before fetal abnormalities and other health risks are detected, before many women in red states, burdened by poverty and travel and the medically needless burdens imposed by their states, can get an abortion at all. And there is no stage of pregnancy where a woman deserves the indignity of a ban. There is no point at which she becomes unworthy of controlling her own life and health; there is no point at which a legislator knows more about whats best for her than she does. Any ban is unacceptable; a national ban, like the kind that the Republicans are now pursuing, is abhorrent.

This was always their plan. The anti-choice movement, and their servants in the Republican party, have long understood the overturning of Roe v Wade the long-desired goal that they achieved this summer, on 24 June, when the US supreme court issued its decision in Dobbs v Jackson as just the opening salvo in their assault on womens rights.

Their real goal is a national ban on abortion, beginning with the kind of legislation introduced this week by Graham. They have made no secret of this: anti-choice groups announced their plan for a national ban even before the Dobbs decision was officially released. They dont have the votes for it now, but they could get the votes in the future. And when they do, a combination of factors, including pressure from fundraisers and their base and what seems to be a genuine hatred for abortion and the freedom that it provides to women, combine to make a political certainty: the next time Republicans hold both houses of US Congress and the White House, they will ban abortion nationwide.

It is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: there will soon be no safe states, no place in America where abortion is legal. In the future, we will come to see this horrible era the time after Roe fell, but before abortion was banned nationally as an interregnum, when the suffering and loss enforced on women by abortion bans was only confined to red states.

As horrible as this state of affairs is, one day we will look back on it fondly. As women bleed for days, and little girls are pushed out of school, and thousands of dreams are abandoned to forced birth even these, eventually, might come to seem like the good old days.

Because though the Republicans will certainly ban abortion nationally at their first opportunity, they may not even need to wait for an electoral victory to do so. A group calling itself Catholics for Life has already asked the supreme court to declare fetuses and embryos to be persons under the 14th amendment, a move that would grant them constitutional rights. From there, its a short step to saying that laws allowing abortion are unconstitutional because they deny equal protection to those persons that are unborn human beings, the Berkeley Law School dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, told Ms magazine. I believe that there may be a majority on the Court to take that position. The unelected, lifetime-appointed judges on the court could extend their assertion in Dobbs that its legal to ban abortion, and instead say that its actually illegal to allow it. To get that outcome, the Republicans dont need to win even one more vote.

These are the stakes of every election now, for the rest of our lives. A national abortion ban will be on the ballot every time Americans vote for congressmen and senators; it will be on the ballot every time they vote for president. In previous years, while Roe was still in place, voting for a governor or state legislatures could affect practical abortion access within a state quite substantially. Red states were able to cut funding, impose labyrinthine requirements, up the cost for patients and impose uniquely onerous burdens on providers. But Roe preserved a bare-bones floor for abortion rights: no state could ban abortion before viability.

Now, any state or the United States at the federal level can ban abortion as early as they want. There is no bottom, and Republicans are determined to keep pushing further and further back, dragging the rights and dignity of American women further and further down into the dirt. This is the possibility that we have to resist every time we vote. Its also the possibility that Democrats accept every day that they do not expand the court.

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Republicans wont stop until abortion is banned across America. And it could be - The Guardian

Joel Benenson, Democratic Strategist:

Well, I will take the last point, you will meet about the generic ballot being dead-even. If you look back historically, that's not a good number for Democrats.

Republicans have done much better at the state levels. They have been able to gerrymander districts to their benefit, just as Democrats do to ours when we're in power. But it gives Republicans an upper hand. And so I think that the House is going to be very, very difficult to hold at this point.

And I think the Senate, we have no margin for error as Democrats. We are 50/50, with the vice president comprising the deciding vote there. And there are tough races all over the country. Now, I think both of them, both parties right now have about 40 safe seats up. So there are going to be a handful of competitive districts that are going to determine the outcomes there.

In some of them, Republicans look good. Some are very close. States like Georgia, the incumbent, Reverend Warnock, is in a tight battle with Herschel Walker. I think he will pull it out. I think Colorado, Senator Bennet will hold his seat. I think Maggie Hassan will hold her seat in New Hampshire. Then you got tossups in North Carolina. I think we're in for a wild night on election night.

And there could be some surprises either way here. But I think Neil is right in his assessment. And I but I also think Democrats holding here is going to be a tough thing in both houses.

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Republicans may not get red wave they hoped for in midterms - PBS NewsHour