The Holder-Jindal Collision: The federal government attacks Louisiana school choice.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal found out late on Friday, August 23. Attorney General Eric Holder was suing to block the state’s school voucher program, which aims to give low-income kids in terrible schools the opportunity to attend better public schools and even private schools. The Justice Department claims the two-year-old program could interfere with federal desegregation orders in several Louisiana parishes, holdovers from the Civil Rights era.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Liberals have been fighting the Louisiana voucher initiative, officially called a “scholarship” program, from the beginning.

“The teacher unions took us all the way to the state supreme court, and the program’s still here,” says Jindal. In May, the court ruled the voucher program was constitutional but that funding it through the general education budget wasn’t. Jindal and the legislature made it a line item in the state budget instead.

Many in the education establishment in Louisiana—Jindal calls them the “coalition of the status quo”—protested the voucher program and other education reforms like charter school expansion and tenure reform. Some even hoped to recall him, the Republican speaker of the house, and other legislators, but the movement went nowhere.

“We’re still here,” Jindal says, a little defiantly. So is the voucher program, at least for this school year. What started as a pilot program in New Orleans during Jindal’s first term as governor expanded to school districts all over Louisiana in 2012.

Because Title 28 contains statutes which govern all federal courts,
the consistent use of “United States” to refer to the federal
government carries enormous weight. Title 28 is the latest word
on this subject, as revised, codified and enacted into positive law
on June 25, 1948. Moreover, the Supremacy Clause elevates
Title 28 to the status of supreme Law of the Land.

To make matters worse and to propagate more confusion,
the entity “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”
incorporated twice in the State of Delaware:

The main problem that arises from these questions is that
United States Attorneys are now filing lawsuits and
prosecuting criminal INDICTMENTS in the name of the
“UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” [sic]
but without any powers of attorney to do so. Compare
28 U.S.C. 547 (which confers powers of attorney to represent
the “United States” and its agencies in federal courts):

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/28/547.html

They are NOT “United States of America Attorneys”, OK?

First of all, they do NOT have any powers of attorney
to represent Delaware corporations in federal courts;
Congress never appropriated funds for them to do so
and Congress never conferred any powers of attorney
on them to do so either.

Secondly, the 50 States are already adequately represented
by their respective State Attorneys General; therefore,
U.S. Attorneys have no powers of attorney to represent
any of the 50 States of the Union, or any of their agencies,
either.

They are “U.S. Attorneys” NOT “U.S.A. Attorneys”, OK?

Accordingly, it is willful misrepresentation for any U.S. Attorney
to attempt to appear in any State or federal court on behalf
of the “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” [sic]. And,
such misrepresentation is actionable under the McDade Act
at 28 U.S.C. 530B:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/28/530B.html

http://www.supremelaw.org/letters/us-v-usa.htm

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