The National Education Association, the most powerful labor union in the country, wants it both ways. It wants every single nickel it can squeeze out of federal taxpayers, but it doesn’t want anyone in Washington telling public schools what they have to do for the money. So despite advocating an ever-greater federal role in education for nearly a century, and practically ramming the U.S. Department of Education down the nation’s throat in the late 1970s, the NEA has declared in the fact sheet for a new “great public schools” manifesto that “constitutionally, education is reserved to the states.” Of course, in just the next line it declares that “the federal government has a vital role to play in advancing the quality of America’s public schools”—that role primarily being to spend lots of money—so you can see the contradiction.

No doubt the NEA’s message would be different were it not for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush’s administration’s signature domestic achievement that’s supposed to make schools show some progress for their federal booty. The law, as has been well documented, is at best unproven and at worst a cruel sham that promises high standards but delivers empty promises and deception. But that’s not why the NEA hates it. They hate it because they don’t want anyone telling them what to do with education money. They want to dictate terms, but the Bush administration prefers to do the dictating itself.

The root problem—aside from the fact that dictatorships pretty much only work for the dictators—is the utter disregard for the Constitution demonstrated by the NEA, big-government conservatives, and the millions of Americans who for decades have treated the Constitution as a wonderful relic to be admired in the National Archives, trotted out whenever they don’t like something the feds are threatening to do, but ignored when they come up with something they think it would be nice for Washington to give them.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t demand that the federal government fund something it’s not supposed to be involved in and then expect it to leave you alone. You can’t demand that the Constitution protect you from what you don’t like and then cast it aside to get things you do. You can either always respect the document that gives Washington only a few, specifically enumerated powers, or you can forget about having any protection at all.

That’s a lesson the NEA needs desperately to learn. Unfortunately, it’s far from alone.

Happy 4th of July…