By: Rep. Trent Franks
OpEd Contributor
November 2, 2010 In April of 1997, a group of 48 valiant souls in the Arizona state legislature, including 31 House members, 16 senators, and the governor of Arizona, united to pass the historic and revolutionary Tuition Tax Credit legislation. Those who understood the specifics and implications of the legislation realized, at the time, that a new day had dawned in America.
The teachers union, sensing their autocratic control of education was in peril, called the bill "fiendishly clever" when, in reality, it was so very simple. It allowed taxpayers to receive a dollar-for- dollar tax credit when they made private, voluntary contributions to charities that use at least 90 percent of the contributions to provide private scholarships for children to attend the school of their parents’ choice. In the past, only wealthy parents could afford such an opportunity for their children. Now, even the poorest child became royalty in the system.
The Arizona Tuition Tax Credit is far different from the long-debated voucher approach. The source of voucher funding is appropriated public funds, which affords leverage to the Left to bring constitutional challenges if religious schools are involved.
However, whenever taxes are reduced, abated, or returned to their original owners in the form of tax credits, in spite of the attending stipulations, taxpayers inevitably gain greater freedom than when government collects and spends the money.
Further, the Tuition Tax Credit becomes applicable only when individuals contribute their private money to a private charity to provide a scholarship to allow someone else's child to go to a private school of their parent’s private choice.
The wholly private nature of the process drives the Left nuts, as they have for so long relied upon activist judges to help them maintain their stranglehold on American education.
For 13 long years, the Left has continued to diligently search for any court that would strip off its constitutional robes in favor of leftist political ideology and magically declare that private funds voluntarily contributed to a private charity by a private individual (before that individual even fills out a tax return), are somehow, in fact, public funds; even though none of the money ever came near any government coffer.
This is an astronomical reach for even the most left-wing judicial activist sitting on the courts today. Such a conclusion by the Supreme Court would be constitutionally indistinguishable from declaring every dollar in every taxpayer’s pocket in America to be public funds.
The Arizona Supreme Court addressed this very argument when it upheld the Tuition Tax Credit in its earlier challenge, explaining that, "under such reasoning all taxpayer income could be viewed as belonging to the state because it is subject to taxation by the legislature."
The other stated basis of the ACLU and the National Education Association (NEA) for challenging the Tuition Tax Credit is that families receiving the resulting scholarships choose a religious school for their child more than half of the time.
So, does that then mean if parents chose nonreligious schools for their children more than half of the time next year, the Tuition Tax Credit would suddenly become constitutional again? What an incoherent postulation.
Of course, obvious incoherence has never deterred the ACLU and the left-wing NEA before. They have now taken their challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court for the second time, and the Court has granted certiorari intending to fully adjudicate the case this time. Oral arguments are on November 3, and the case is Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn.
I wonder if the Appellants have apprised the Supreme Court that striking down the Tuition Tax Credit would also constitutionally vaporize the G.I. Bill, or any special tax treatment or deductibility for contributions given to any charity that even remotely touches on anything religious.
Your church, synagogue, and even the Salvation Army come to mind. Such a ruling would decimate America’s charities and would, for decades to come, be the basis of ubiquitous challenges by the ACLU and other groups obsessed with anti-religious zealotry.
However, maybe this time the ACLU and the NEA have overplayed their hand. Maybe this time even the radical liberals appointed by President Obama to the Supreme Court will cast just one respectful glance toward logic and the Constitution.
Perhaps they will even extend a gesture of hope toward the more than 100,000 children currently under scholarship along with the future generations who will be afforded the chance to walk in the sunnier places on the higher roads of life because of the Tuition Tax Credit.
Thomas Jefferson said, “The purpose of education is to create young citizens with knowing heads and loving hearts.” Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of today’s classroom is the philosophy of tomorrow’s government.”
All of us intrinsically know that the spiritual, social, and academic principles inculcated into the hearts and minds of our children establish, more than any other mortal factor, the paradigm of America’s future. Will we primarily trust a government-run bureaucracy or the parents to determine those principles? It will be one of the two, and it is a question of inexpressible gravity.
If the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Tuition Tax Credit, as I believe the justices will, the long-fought battle over who decides what academic and spiritual tenets will be placed in the minds and souls of America’s children will make a pivotal and historic turn toward Mom and Dad. It will be a very good day for America and her future generations.
Rep. Trent Franks, R-AZ, is a former member of the Arizona state legislature and the author of the tuition tax credit measure.
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