For Chris Christie and NJEA, N.J.’s primary teacher union, it’s deja vu all over again. After several years of a relatively decorous detente, we’re back to the rude fisticuffs and catcalls of 2010 and 2011, and all within a matter of days. What’s behind this political and behavioral regression?
Christie’s strategy is clear. In order to secure the 2016 Republican nomination for president, he has to confirm his conservative bona fides. Thus, this week he vetoed a gun control bill that he supported last year and endorsed Tea Party nut Steve Lonegan for U.S. Senate.
Christie’s attack on N.J.’s primary teacher union NJEA last week in Boston, then, was just one more genuflection to the Ron Pauls and Rick Santorums of the GOP. During a speech to the Republican National Committee (supposedly closed to the press but leaked to a Politico reporter) Christie described NJEA’s resistance to N.J.’s 2010 passage of health and benefits reform legislation:
“The teachers union in our state collects $140 million a year in dues. … It’s a $140 million political slush fund for them to use however they wish in mandatory dues,” he said. “That’s who we’re up against. So we decided very early that we had to fix the pension and benefit problem, at least move toward fixing it. And the only way to do it was to take them on directly… My philosophy on this can be best described this way: When you come to a new school yard and you’re the new kid in school — like you are when you’re the governor and you come to Trenton for the first time — and you walk onto the schoolyard and you see a bunch of people lying on the ground bloody and beaten up, and you see one person standing there with their arms folded across their chest staring at you. That’s the bully. In New Jersey, that bully is the New Jersey Education Association.”