The Heavy Hand of Government

Another setback for the administration:

In a stinging rebuke of President Bush’s signature education law, the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that orders state officials to ignore provisions of the federal law that conflict with Utah’s education goals or that require state financing.

The bill is the most explicit legislative challenge to the federal law by a state, and its passage marked the collapse of a 15-month lobbying effort against it by the Bush administration.

Federal officials fear Utah’s action could embolden other states to resist what many states consider intrusive or unfunded provisions of the federal law, known as No Child Left Behind.

Utah’s action comes as a federal-state conflict over the education law appears to be escalating. The attorney general of Connecticut has announced that he will sue the Department of Education over the law’s finances, Texas is in open defiance of a federal ruling on testing disabled children and many state legislatures have protested various provisions of the federal law, which has required a sweeping expansion of standardized testing.

Despite the fact that education funding went through the roof, it appears we still mandated more than we provided:

The Utah bill leans heavily for its rationale on a provision in the federal education law that Republican congressmen during the first years of the Clinton administration, which forbids federal officials from requiring states to spend their own money to enact the policies outlined in the law.

And the battle between conservatives and big government compassionate conservatives wages on.