Editorial Roundup:

Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Dec. 21

In extraordinary times, true statesmanship is needed

Four and a half months ago, this editorial board declared it past time for South Dakota’s elected leaders to decide where they would draw the line. The “line” we referred to then was President Donald Trump’s exhortations against four Congresswomen of color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

We found the tepid public responses of the three men elected to represent South Dakotans to be inadequate. Senator Mike Rounds initially otherized Trump’s targets, placing the blame for the president’s comments on the women themselves, implying in a Twitter post that they were not patriots and did not love America.

Representative Dusty Johnson, who labeled Trump’s comments “inappropriate” and not “helpful,” took pains to indicate his close alignment with the president against the women’s policy stances. Senator John Thune expressed mildly that the president “tone down the rhetoric… and focus on the issues that matter to the American people.”

South Dakota’s national leaders, all members of the GOP, have assumed stances similarly reluctant to allow a suggestion of daylight between themselves and the head of their party as the U.S. House of Representatives voted this week – for just the third time in our nation’s history – to pass articles of impeachment against the occupant of the White House.

Johnson cast his party-line House vote against the two articles, saying that “impeachment is not in the best interest of this country, and in fact it has only deepened the partisan divide that truly plagues this country… I pray with all my heart that the anger and the division in this chamber will give way to an honorableness and a productivity and a time of working together.”

Rounds dismissed revelations from the House hearings. His statement to the Argus Leader on Wednesday night stated “House Democrats have voted to impeach this president, and yet, they still have not provided the evidence to substantiate an impeachable offense. The Senate will execute its constitutional duty, bring this process to a close, and get back to doing the people’s work.”

Thune weighed in that “100 senators are being asked to consider undoing a national election…the Senate will fulfill its constitutional responsibility and approach this trial with the seriousness and fairness it deserves…the president will be afforded a fair and equal opportunity to participate – an opportunity that has been noticeably absent throughout the process thus far.”

It should be noted that President Trump did not offer up defense testimony and instructed administration officials not to comply with House subpoenas to testify.

The charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, which passed the House on unfortunate but predictable partisan lines, do warrant earnest adjudication by the Senate. That the Senate has never voted to remove a president from office and the House has only voted to impeach a president on three occasions indicates the seriousness with which such proceedings should be approached.

So far, it does not appear that the Senate is inclined to conduct anything more than a show trial when and if the articles are sent from the House. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made that clear when he announced immediately after the House vote that “everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position.”

We fully recognize that politics cannot be excised from this process. Neither do we suggest that Democrats have conducted themselves blamelessly. South Dakota’s Tom Daschle, who was minority leader during former President Bill Clinton’s Senate trial in early 1999, acknowledged that his staff had been in contact with members of the White House team throughout the process.

Some have criticized the House leadership’s decision to move forward with impeachment, warning that it could backfire and significantly harm the Democratic Party’s election prospects next fall. But the principles of our republic must not now be sacrificed to political expediency. Calls to “decide Trump’s fate at the ballot box” ignore Congress’s constitutional duty to check egregious executive abuses of power that could indeed encroach upon the integrity of the 2020 election.

This board harbors no illusion that our words will appeal to our federal legislators’ better angels, moving them to honor their oath to defend the Constitution rather than march to the beat of polling numbers. Thune has displayed fleeting moments of self-awareness and independence, voicing doubts about Trump that he has walked back soon after. We expect that he, along with Rounds and Johnson, will continue to toe the party line as America hurtles toward a gravely important election year with partisan tempers aflame.

But they also take seriously, one must assume, the political gravity of their office in extraordinary times. The extent to which Thune and Rounds are willing to weigh evidence and make impartial judgments as jurors in a Senate trial could determine how history views their involvement at a time when statesmanship was needed above all.

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Black Hills Pioneer, Dec. 21

State needs to fund teacher pay increases

Unfunded mandates.

By definition, an unfunded mandate is a statute or regulation that requires a state or local government to perform certain actions, with no money provided for fulfilling the requirements.

Such is the case of increasing teacher pay in South Dakota.

Since 2016, school districts in the state have been held accountable for increasing teacher pay, but other than the year one, the promised increases have been hard to come by when calculating their state aid.

Local school boards know that money is tight and board members can’t decide to raise teacher salaries with money the state doesn’t give them.

Under then-governor Dennis Daugaard, there was a major overhaul of the state aid funding formula in 2016 shifting the focus from funding based on the number of students a district has to funding based on student-teacher ratios.

The reform came with a half-cent increase in the state sales tax which was supposed to help fund the teacher pay increase. It did, and in that first year, teacher salaries increased an average of 8 percent.

That was the objective of a Blue Ribbon Task Force brought together by Daugaard in 2015 to address low teacher pay, a looming teacher shortage and school district financing.

One of the centerpieces of the 2016 K-12 Education Package was the goal of achieving a statewide average teacher salary of $48,500. School districts are still responsible for meeting the state’s target teacher salary, but the money to do so has dried up.

At a town-hall type meeting in Rapid City following Gov. Kristi Noem’s 2021 budget address, Curt Pochart of the Rapid City School Board asked if schools are still going to be expected to meet the state’s target salary for teachers even though there will be no increase in funds for the state’s school districts.

“Is taking away that hammer part of not providing for the increase?” Pochart said.

Noem said nothing in statute has been changed concerning education funding.

“What would have to happen is that someone would have to bring a bill to change that,” she said. “The budget is as proposed. We don’t change statute in the budget. A bill would have to come to change the requirement to meet the minimum teacher salaries during the legislative session.”

If South Dakota wants to compete regionally and nationally for quality teachers, it must commit to funding this program.

Come on Gov. Noem and legislators – pony up!