Witness Tuesday’s 247-161 largely party-line House vote to approve a Senate bill shovelling another $26.1 billion out to state education and Medicaid programs. The White House has promoted the bill as emergency assistance for strained state budgets. But this unique brand of therapy drives states to spend more, not less. The “assistance” is so expensive that several governors were begging for relief even before Mr. Obama signed it into law.

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Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) says he doesn’t want the Democrats’ $26 billion state aid bill. The bill would provide $16 billion in enhanced Medicaid funding and $10 billion in education dollars.

“The bill as passed [by] the Senate will force Mississippi to rewrite its current year (FY11) budget,” Barbour said in a statement. “Preliminary estimates of the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration show that we will now have to spend between $50-100 million of state funds — funds that must be taken away from public safety, human services, mental health and other state priorities and given to education — in order for an additional $98 million of federal funds to be granted to education. There is no justification for the federal government hijacking state budgets, but that is exactly what Congress has done.”

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Tea Party activists plan to protest next week’s House vote on a $26 billion state aid package at district offices around the country.

The activists are upset over $10 billion in the package for a fund to stop teacher layoffs.

Fiscal conservatives also are fired up over reports that the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) pushed Pelosi to call the House back for the vote. The union warned Pelosi that states would be forced to lay off thousands of teachers if Congress doesn’t approve the money by the end of August.

Protests are planned in at least a dozen states, and Tea Party activists are set to show up at congressional offices Saturday through Monday, according to conservative activists familiar with their plans.

Demonstrations will occur at the offices of Democrats’ facing tough reelection races, including Reps. Betsy Markey (Colo.), Dina Titus (Nev.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Earl Pomeroy (N.D.), John Spratt (S.C.) and Rick Boucher (Va.), according to a planning paper circulating among conservative groups.

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The crusade for an education jobs bill, led by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress, has always struck us as more of an election-year favor for teachers unions than an optimal use of public resources. Billed as an effort to stimulate the economy, it’s not clearly more effective than alternative uses of the cash. Yes, school budgets are tight across the country, but the teacher layoff “crisis” is exaggerated. In fact, as happens each year, many teachers who got pink slips in the spring have been notified that they’ll be hired after all. Many layoffs could have been — and indeed have been — avoided by modest union concessions.

As of last school year, the money for 5.5 percent of the 6 million K-12 jobs nationwide came from Washington through the 2009 stimulus; the new money reinforces this dangerous dependency.

Nor does the legislation target areas with the most projected teacher layoffs.

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By Bill Wilson

This could the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Yesterday the Senate passed a $26.1 billion bailout for bankrupt states like New York and California, which includes $10 billion for public teachers spending and $16.1 billion for state Medicaid spending.  Now, the Politico is reporting that Nancy Pelosi will speedily bring the House of Representatives back from its August recess to pass it and have it on Barack Obama’s desk next week.

The American people rightly are outraged at the prospect of balancing the budgets for states that refuse to cut their own spending. Last year’s $862 billion “stimulus” already included some $145 billion to balance state budgets, and this year’s $26.1 billion bailout will only forestall necessary cuts to those budgets.

While Americans struggle to balance their family budgets during this weak economic recovery, they expect elected officials to muster the political will to do the same.  Instead, all 59 Senate Democrats and Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe have caved to pressure from the public teachers unions — all to help fill their campaign coffers.

Out of the estimated 3.3 million public school teachers nationwide, teachers unions were expecting about 160,000 layoffs this year — just 4.8 percent of all teachers. 38.1 percent of those layoffs are centered in just three states: 9,000 in New Jersey, 16,000 in New York and 36,000 in California.

About 57 percent of those 160,000 teachers are unionized as noted by the Heritage Foundation, with contributions to state and local unions averaging $300 per teacher.  Add another $162 per teacher to the National Education Association and $190 per teacher to the American Federation of Teachers, as reported by Education Next, and the Senate easily has voted to give a minimum $40 million to the public teachers unions’ political coffers.  That money will be mobilized into campaign ads, direct mail, phone banks, you name it, all to help elect Democrats.

Democrats want to ensure that their reelection campaigns well-funded, and so now the House is rushing back to the nation’s capital to secure the political slush money.

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Milwaukee

The Obama administration is pressuring Congress to spend $23 billion to rehire the more than 100,000 teachers who have been laid off across the country. Before Congress succumbs, it should know about the unfolding fiasco in Milwaukee. Wisconsin is a microcosm of the union intransigence that’s fueling the school funding crisis in so many cities and states and leading to so many pink slips. It also shows why a federal bailout is a mistake.

Because of declining tax collections and falling enrollment, Milwaukee’s school board announced in June that 428 teachers were losing their jobs—including Megan Sampson, who was just awarded a teacher-of-the-year prize. Yet the teachers union, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, had it within its power to avert almost all of the layoffs.

The average pay for a Milwaukee school teacher is $56,000, which is hardly excessive. Benefits are another matter. According to a new study by the MacIver Institute, a state think tank, the cost of health and pension benefits now exceeds $40,000 a year per teacher—bringing total compensation to $100,500.

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But after years of crafting emergency spending bills for war, the appetite for additional military dollars grew thin among liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives. In fact, so thin that the only way to pass the legislation would be to pile on $20 billion in domestic spending and offer opponents of the conflicts three separate votes to either slash money for the war, order a withdrawal or require the president submit a timetable to pull out of Afghanistan.

To find out how much this bill is going to cost you, go to Fox News’ Taxpayer Calculator.

None of the anti-war amendments came close to passing in the House. They were mainly designed to give war opponents on both the right and left a chance to weigh in on conflicts they feel have lasted too long.

So that contorted the legislation into a milieu of domestic spending advocated by many Democrats.

The marquee items in the measure included $10 billion in aid to states to help avoid teacher layoffs and $5 billion for collegiate Pell Grants. The package also provided $142 million to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and $1 billion to assist youths find summer work. There is $1.15 in the package to compensate black farmers who argue the Department of Agriculture discriminated against them for years when it came to doling out loans. Even though the government settled a lawsuit with black farmers more than a decade ago, many missed the deadline to file claims. The money in this legislation is designed to help those who filed late.

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