Federal school choice legislation being readied by Senator Ted Cruz seems to be opening a rift on the right. The senator’s plan is for legislation to create a federal tax credit for contributions to scholarship-granting organizations. One might think it would be a lead pipe cinch among conservatives, who’ve pushed school choice for more than 50 years. Yet objections are surfacing on the right.

We first read about this in a post by Ira Stoll on the blog of Harvard’s journal EducationNext, of which our star columnist has emerged as the new managing editor. He paused over this sentence in President Trump’s State of the Union speech: “To help support working parents, the time has come to pass School Choice for Americans’ children.” Why, Mr. Stoll wondered, was the phrase “School Choice” capitalized.

That made it look to Mr. Stoll like the “title of a law,” which took him to Mr. Cruz’s planned bill. The Senator spoke of it in January at a rally in Texas. Both Messrs. Trump and Cruz are framing school choice around working parents. Mr. Cruz reckons his legislation would “unlock billions of dollars to help enable Texans and children all across this country to attend the very best school.”

The Heritage Foundation, though, is worried that the federal tax credit Mr. Cruz is eyeing would damage school choice. Heritage’s Daily Signal acknowledges that tax credit scholarships, providing tax credits “sometimes dollar-for-dollar” to individuals and corporations that donate to scholarship granting organizations, are “smart state-level education policy.”

What worries Heritage is the prospect of federal meddling in local and state education. The measure, it reckons, “would likely subject private schools to future regulations from an administration and Congress less friendly to education choice.” Even with strong prohibitions against federal meddling, it would be “impossible” to prevent subsequent administrations or Congresses from making trouble.

The Signal fears that future regulations “could take the form of dictating schools’ admissions policies; ‘accountability’ procedures, such as testing and reporting; academic content; and federally determined bathroom policy.” It goes so far as to suggest that the federal government lacks constitutional authority to get involved in education the way the Cruz legislation being mooted suggests.

Our own view is that the less the federal government is involved in education the better. We have gone over the Constitution with a top-of-the-line Madison-brand electron microscope without discerning an enumerated power in respect of education — or meddling in it the way the Daily Signal fears the federal government might if given the chance (not that an administration wouldn’t try).

We did, though, find in Article I the power of Congress “to lay and collect taxes.” If that power is enough to allow Heritage’s contributors to deduct from their income donations making possible the publication of the Signal, it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t also comprehend the power to offer, also, favorable tax treatment for donations to charities that support scholarships.

What would shock the Founders down to the ground of their one-room schools is the alternative that is our current status quo. It’s one in which parents of private and religious school students pay a full tax burden for public schools they can’t use — and in which parents who can’t afford to escape are forced to send their children to public schools that are failing. No wonder Senator Cruz has stepped up.