Roll Call: Donations from teachers’ unions spiked as Congress debated school reopening
See below for damning evidence of teachers’ unions buying Democrats’ silence on school reopenings.
Democrats are loyal to teachers’ unions, not America’s kids.
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Donations from teachers unions spiked as Congress debated school reopening, virus relief
Kate Ackley
Roll Call
April 28, 2021
As debates raged earlier this year over reopening schools and including money for education in a massive coronavirus relief package, the nation’s largest teachers unions sharply increased their spending on political contributions, a comparison to the same period in 2019 shows.
The money overwhelmingly went to Democrats, who had just taken control of the White House and the Senate while retaining House control.
The American Federation of Teachers political action committee gave $1.6 million to congressional candidates and committees, including $1 million to House Majority PAC, a super PAC that boosts Democratic candidates, a CQ Roll Call analysis of federal filings showed. The same group disclosed giving just $45,000 to federal committees in the first three months of 2019, the same point in the two-year election cycle.
The National Education Association’s PAC increased its federal donations by 38 percent, shelling out $371,000 in this year’s first quarter compared with $269,000 in the same period of 2019.
The uptick in donations, almost entirely to Democrats, came as the debate over remote schooling became political fodder. Congressional Republicans have criticized Democrats for being too cozy with teachers unions, a longstanding political ally, and thwarting school reopenings.
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A spokesperson for the NEA did not provide a comment.
The donations of both groups have long favored Democrats, though their contributions in the first quarter of this year, skewed even more so toward the party in power. The NEA donated to the GOP House and Senate campaign arms in early 2019, but did not do so early this year, according to Federal Election Commission records. It also hadn’t donated to the Democratic campaign arms this year, either, giving the vast majority to Democratic congressional candidates and their affiliated leadership PACs.
The AFT’s biggest donations, other than its top-spending contribution to House Majority PAC, went to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Each received $105,000 from AFT in the first quarter, disclosures show.
Parent advocacy efforts have popped up in school districts across the country, including in the Washington, D.C., region, oftentimes in opposition to the position of teachers unions. The unions, for example, lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year to keep in place guidance that schools maintain six feet of distance between students, while the open-schools parent groups lobbied for three feet to allow more students to return to classrooms. The CDC revised its guidance to three feet last month.
Also in the first quarter, Congress voted along party lines to include nearly $130 billion for schools as part of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. No Republicans voted for that measure.
Republicans have said they would prioritize the issue of pandemic school closures in their 2022 campaigns. GOP Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said it would be “one of the defining issues” of the midterm elections.
“House Democrats’ undying loyalty to teachers’ unions has hurt America’s kids and Democrats will answer for it in 2022,” said NRCC spokeswoman Torunn Sinclair in an email Tuesday.
The issue may feature prominently in some suburban congressional districts, including in Virginia and New Jersey where Republicans are looking to pick up seats. It remains to be seen, however, how relevant the topic will be when voters head to the polls in 18 months. GOP operatives focused on Senate races say it’s likely to be an issue for them, too.
“Teachers unions have bought the silence and complicity of Democratic Senators who should be standing up to reopen schools,” said Jack Pandol, communications director for the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC.
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Rory Cooper, a former congressional GOP aide who like other political parents from both sides of the aisle is active in the push to reopen local public school districts, said the uptick in political donations amounted to the unions rewarding Democratic lawmakers “for paying the ransom money,” his term for the billions to education in the COVID relief measure this year.
The donations, he added, “should be toxic, frankly, at this point because the stances the unions are taking are just so deeply unpopular. It reinforces that teachers unions are political organizations designed to accrue political power.”
Some of the recipients of the teachers’ union donations in the first quarter of this year are lawmakers likely to face competitive reelection fights. Of the 47 Democrats on the initial target list released by the NRCC, 33 received contributions of $5,000 each from the AFT, and 37 received contributions of $2,000 each from the NEA. Battleground senators up next year, including Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, each got $2,000 from the NEA as well. Kelly also received $5,000 from the AFT.
Both the AFT and the NEA have broad federal policy and legislative agendas, according to recently filed lobbying disclosure reports.
The AFT disclosed lobbying on COVID-19 relief and vaccine priority for educators as well as voting rights legislation and a sweeping overhaul of campaign finance, elections and lobbying laws known as HR 1 and S 1.
The NEA, too, disclosed lobbying on the campaign finance and elections overhaul as well as a measure that would overhaul policing after the killing of George Floyd last year.
Both unions disclosed lobbying on “Removing a certain Member from certain standing committees of the House of Representatives,” as the AFT report puts it. Democrats in the House voted in early February to remove freshman GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from the chamber’s Budget panel and its Education and Labor panel, in response to her promotion of racist and conspiracy theorist views.
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Read the full story from Roll Call, here.