Well, howdy there, Internet people, it's Bell again.

So today, we're going to talk about the GOP, introducing legislation to get rid of the Department of Education.

As an aside real quick, I got a message from somebody overseas asking why the Republican Party is abbreviated as GOP.

It stands for Grand Ole Party, a term from the 1870s when the party was actually the more liberal party in the U.S.

Okay, back to the topic.

It looks like there will be competing bills from Republicans trying to get rid of the Department of Education.

They vary in approach and how they plan on going about it. You have the promised one from

Kentucky Representative Thomas Massey. He says it'll be a one-sentence bill. Quote, the Department

of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026.

Hope you weren't counting on financial aid or funding for your schools. That's one extreme.

The other is a bill that seems to just get rid of the Department of Education in name only.

I haven't gone through the bill line by line yet, but the

nonpartisan Congressional Research Service summary seems to indicate that the program would

be shifted to the Department of Labor or DOD or Health and Human Services or Treasury.

That one is called the Returning Education Back to Our States Act. It honestly

looks like it would create a giant maze of education-related bureaucracy in other departments,

but it doesn't, at least from an early look, seem like anything appropriated is getting cut.

So, the legislation ranges from the devastating to the seemingly pointless.

People who understand what the Education Department does often wonder why conservatives want to cut it.

A lot of rank-and-file Republicans believe that the Federal Department of Education is responsible for the curriculum.

They don't like or test scores or whatever.

The policies governing what they're complaining about are always things set at the state or local level.

...