Member Newsletter
Two updates from the Josh regional news mail bag.
First, remember the Central Bucks (County) School Board? This is the school board north of Philadelphia that got caught up in the Moms for Liberty tide in 2021 and then flipped back in 2023 when the locals — good upstanding folks, which I know from personal experience — got sick of the crap and turned out the Moms for Liberty crowd and gave Democrats a 6-to-3 majority on the board. This is the place where there was a very suspicious sweetheart deal cut with the departing superintendent — about which there’s now ongoing litigation. It’s also the stomping ground of our good friend “Cool Mom” Clarice Schillinger.
Well, now it turns out that two of the remaining three right-wingers — Lisa Sciscio and Debra Cannon — are done. Like they’ve resigned. First, they verbally resigned on February 13th. And apparently you can’t do that. So now they’ve resigned in writing, which you can. A special meeting of the board will be held this Friday to officially accept those resignations.
Sciscio and Cannon have various explanations about why they’re resigning. But the gist seems to be that it’s a lot less fun MomsforLibertying when you’re in a 6-3 minority than when you’re in a 6-3 majority. It probably doesn’t help that a decent amount of what the new board is doing is unwinding the suspicious if not necessarily unethical or illegal work of the old board. (Here’s a an op-ed by a member who was in the minority during the Moms for Liberty era that says, yeah, it sucked but I didn’t resign like you hypocrites.)
Oh and remember Kari Lake? This isn’t really local news in the way we normally mean since she’s running for Senate. But she seems to be wobbling a bit on her down-the-line MAGA party line now that it seems increasingly likely that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won’t even run for reelection and she’s got a tough race on her hand whether or not it’s just her and Democrat Ruben Gallego or a three-way race including Sinema. You’ll remember that Lake is not only a big supporter of Trumpite Rigged Electionism but has her own version of it tied to her 2022 defeat to Governor Katie Hobbs. As far as I can tell, Lake still basically says she’s the legitimate governor of Arizona.
In any case, in yesterday’s interview, Lake admitted she couldn’t identify who exactly had stolen her 2022 (purported) gubernatorial victory from her. “I don’t know who exactly stole the election, but there are a lot of people who are running elections poorly and we’ve seen the result.” She also went wobbly on her support for Arizona’s pre-state territory ban on nearly all abortions. And making fun of John McCain? Well, people have misunderstood that, she explains. She was jesting. Or something like that. And leaving NATO or encouraging Russia to attack NATO members who aren’t dedicating 2% of GDP to defense? Well, she doesn’t want to send U.S. troops to Ukraine. And no, that wasn’t the question.