Schumer Stands Off
New York's two Democratic senators split their votes yesterday on a landmark piece of legislation — a spending bill that, among its other provisions, created a school voucher program in Washington, D.C. that will begin this fall. Senator Clinton voted against the bill, casting a vote to keep thousands of poor children in Washington trapped in a failing school system. The public schools in Washington are so bad that when Mrs. Clinton and her husband lived there, they opted not to send their daughter Chelsea to public school. Instead she went to a private school, Sidwell Friends. The law that Senator Schumer voted for — and that Mrs. Clinton voted against — would allow ordinary residents of the District of Columbia to get the same chance to opt out that Chelsea Clinton did. It would provide $14 million to grant scholarships of up to $7,500 to at least 1,600 schoolchildren, allowing them to attend private or parochial schools. Yesterday's vote split not just New York's Democratic senators but also California's. Senator Feinstein, like Mr. Schumer, voted for the voucher bill. Senator Boxer, like Mrs. Clinton, voted against it. The bill ended up passing into law on a 65-to-28 vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.
We don't always see eye to eye with Mr. Schumer, and we're not under any illusions that he's going to emerge as a fire-breathing advocate of breaking up the public school monopoly nationwide. Yesterday's vote was on a huge spending bill that included lots of money for things other than school vouchers, which are an education policy that Mr. Schumer has had a history of opposing. But when, as yesterday, Mr. Schumer shows the independence to break with the knee-jerk left wing in his party and risk angering the powerful teachers unions to cast a vote for an experiment with school choice, he deserves credit. Somewhere up there, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another Democratic senator from New York who supported school vouchers, was smiling on Mr. Schumer yesterday, and wondering what Mrs. Clinton — the Barbara Boxer of New York — was thinking. And we can't help but agree with Moynihan. It was a vote that made clear why Mr. Schumer is the state's senior senator.
