AF Members in Mainstream Media

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal and a column by George Will in the Washington Post both reported on the work of AF team members this week.

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, entitled “Pell Grant Flunks Out”, on a report co-written by Jenna Robinson, one of the organizers of AF’s Raleigh chapter. The report found that the Federal Pell Grant for higher education cost about “$36 billion a year in 2009-2010” and “it took up half the Department of Education budget and is the federal government’s single biggest expense on higher education.” The article goes on to question the prudence of such a wildly expensive “investment”.

Jenna Robinson’s report was co-published with Duke Cheston through the Pope Center for Higher Education, where she has worked since 2007. Jenna has also been instrumental to the growth of AFF’s Raleigh chapter in recent months. She will be a featured speaker at AFF’s July 19 roundtable about higher education in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, George Will’s most recent column focuses on “Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court,” a new book by Clint Bolick, a member of AF’s Executive Council. “Two-Fer” examines the modern relationship between the presidency and the Supreme Court and what it means for adjudication on individual rights.

George Will quotes Bolick’s book, which says “when courts fail to enforce the Constitution, typically they say that the proper recourse is through democratic processes — which offers hollow comfort given that presumably it was democratic processes that created the constitutional violation in the first place.” Will goes on to argue that the court’s preference for judicial “restraint” and “democratic processes” often amounts to “dereliction of judicial duty” to protect individual liberties.

AF applauds the vision, effort, and success of these and all of its members, and we look forward to reporting on many more members’ success stories in the future!