The blue wave made its way through New Hampshire Tuesday night when both U.S. House seats went to Democrats as well as both houses of the state legislature. Neither of the state’s U.S. senators, both Democrats, were up for reelection this year. The results left incumbent Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH) among the…
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The Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General and the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office announced last week that they are joining forces to tackle welfare fraud, specifically food-stamp fraud. Commonly referred to as the food-stamp program, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has increasingly become a concern among law-enforcement officials.…
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Right after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the FY2019 ceiling for refugee admissions would be no more than 30,000, Democrats in Congress flew into action and federal refugee resettlement contractors began objecting. On Thursday, 51 U.S. House Democrats, including Tennessee’s Steve Cohen, co-sponsored House Resolution 1073 calling for no…
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Democratic gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean placed a high priority on meeting the needs of “new Americans” during his two terms as mayor of Nashville. Speaking forcefully against an English-first proposal to launching programs like “MyCity Academy” and “Pathway for New Americans,” Dean looked for ways to politically capture the support of…
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After serving his last term as governor of Tennessee, Bredesen dabbled in “partisan politicking” and working to help other Democrats get elected: As a loyal Democrat, Bredesen this year declared his support for President Obama’s re-election, endorsed the party’s 4th Congressional District nominee, Eric Stewart, and did “robo-calls” supporting a…
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Phil Bredesen, the health insurance executive turned governor, had an antidote to contain the spiraling costs of the state’s Medicaid program – disenroll elderly, sick and disabled Tennesseans from TennCare. According to Gordon Bonnyman, co-founder of the Tennessee Justice Center, two years into Bredesen’s first term as governor, “[a]pproximately 200,000…
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When he was governor of Tennessee from 2003 to 2011, Phil Bredesen set the state up to receive a dramatically higher number of refugees – an increase well into the thousands – bringing with it significant financial benefit to federal refugee contractors like Catholic Charities of Tennessee and World Relief.…
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The cost to teach English to non-English speaking students in Tennessee public schools has increased over 100 percent since FY 2016. In FY 2016, the total cost for English Language Learner (ELL) services was $94,110,440. Seventy percent was funded through the state’s Basic Education Program (BEP) in the amount of $65,877,308,…
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Philadelphia-based Education Law Center told the city’s School Reform Commission that immigrant students and English Language Learner students (EL), need expanded programming, “improved cultural competency” for teachers, more support for the parents of these students and greater access to vocational training programs. According to the Law Center, test results show that…
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From the inception of the federal Refugee Admissions Program in 1980 until 2003, the first year of Phil Bredesen’s first term as governor of Tennessee, only a handful of Somali refugees were resettled in Tennessee by the federal government. That all changed in 2003. Between 2003 and 2011, Bredesen’s last…
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