Come to think of it, if not for one man, Ryan Walters isn't any of our problems
Come to think of it, if not for one man, Ryan Walters isn't any of our problems
It was Kevin Stitt who delivered Walters into public life
Because it’s so hard keeping track of Ryan Walters’ malfeasance, churlishness, pettiness and absolute lack of interest in the actual job for which he was elected, we’re not going to write about him today.
Well, not exactly.
You’ll see.
Yet, to get there, we must begin with Walters, for all politics practiced by Republicans in our state right now begins and ends with him, their constant conundrum.
Should they be for him?
Should they be against him?
If they’re for him, do they lay low or defend him, and if they defend him, how much?
If they’re against him, do they lay low or tell folks they’re against him, and if they tell folks they’re against him, do they tell in public or in private, on the record or off?
Sounds tiring.
I digress.
So, last week, M. Scott Carter penned this great article in The Oklahoman, taking readers behind the scenes to explain a meeting that took place the day before Walters demanded to be impeached with a let’s-get-this-overwith-already plea to speaker Charles McCall and house Republicans.
That happened on Friday, Aug. 16, however, on Thursday the 15th, Carter reported, a meeting took place involving Walters, governor Kevin Stitt, speaker-elect Kyle Hilbert and senate pro tem-designate Lonnie Paxton, the last two of whom will be taking over for McCall and Greg Treat as leaders in their respective chambers.
Here’s a piece of Carter’s reporting.
[The] meeting, held at the Governor’s Mansion last Thursday, was most likely sparked by a letter from Stitt’s education secretary, Nellie Sanders. Sometime last week, Sanders sent Walters a letter asking for information about the delayed funding for school resource safety officers and seeking answers from Walters.
The letter, written in terse and formal language, sent a clear message to Walters: Stitt’s office was watching and concerned. School safety, just as the new school year is beginning, is a major issue.
According to a source who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly, it was during this meeting that Walters learned he was being investigated by the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT).
Stitt’s office confirmed the meeting. In an email to The Oklahoman, Abegail Cave, the governor’s spokesperson, said the meeting was Stitt’s idea.
“Governor Stitt called the meeting to get Supt. Walters and legislative leadership in the room to bring the rhetoric down and get to the bottom of the funding question,” Cave wrote.
Paxton, whose wife is a public school teacher, also did something wholly and commendably uncommon by state house Republican standards.
He went on the record.
“I was not expecting what happened on Friday. There was no indication on Thursday [what] was going to happen Friday.”
Now that you’re caught up, what do you make of it?
Does anything hit you over the head about it, because it does me and here it is:
The governor’s desperately trying to get Walters under control, to get him to quit making bad news every single day for Republicans in Oklahoma, to quit making everything worse, because if anybody can talk sense to Walters, it ought to be him, because without Kevin Stitt there is no Ryan Walters.
Period.
Never forget it.
Stitt gave us Walters.
Even before he appointed him education secretary in his first term, prior to Walters’ election to the post he now abuses, Stitt made Walters.
He made him when he allowed Walters to put him in touch with an out-of-state outfit called ClassWallet that was given a no-bid contract to administer $18 million in federal funding designed to defray education expenses to Oklahoma families during the COVID pandemic.
It was Walters’ original scandal and he wasn’t even on the state payroll yet, though by the time his irresponsibility became known, he was.
Stitt could have cast him aside.
He didn’t.
Originally, hundreds of thousands of dollars designed to be spent on educational items were alleged to have been spent on consumer items, like televisions, furniture and appliances thanks to Walters rejecting the guard rails ClassWallet could have placed on the transactions.
As it turned out, it was more than twice that.
“Proper system controls were offered by the digital wallet vendor to limit the families’ purchases to education-related items but those controls were declined by the individual placed in charge of the … program,” state auditor Cindy Byrd later said, alluding to Walters. “We found that $1.7 million was spent on various non-educational items.”
Without Stitt doing Walters’ bidding, those federal dollars are not misspent. Without making Walters his education secretary, good chance Walters never becomes state superintendent. Without Walters becoming state superintendent, the very existence of public education in Oklahoma isn’t being threatened … to say nothing of Walters’ very real reign of very real terror: making war with anybody who dares disagree with him; his intransigence in the face of constitutional oversight; his performative bullying in the wake of an Owasso student’s suicide; his ever-present want-to-be-authoritarian predilections.
In the middle of a full-on exodus of state department of education employees chased out of their jobs by Walters’ refusal to do his, Stitt said this:
“So you’re telling me we’ve lost 130 bureaucrats up here in Oklahoma City and we’ve still got our education system rolling across the state? Sounds like a good thing to me.”
It’s out of touch, shits on public servants who have important jobs we need them to perform and a reminder so many Republicans have no respect for the government for which they campaign and cajole Oklahomans to put them in charge.
They’re also the words of a man who’s very much a co-conspirator of the Napoleon-complexed divider he recently brought into his residence, along with Hilbert and Paxton, to be told to pipe the %$#& down.
Stitt spoke those words April 12, perhaps trying to be funny, only they’re not remotely funny now, a week after it came to light the U.S. Department of Education, in a 98-page report issued July 25, identified 32 areas Walters’ education department must address pronto, giving it, as The Oklahoman reported only a week ago, “30 or 60 days in which to provide documentation on items, update or develop plans, take corrective action,” on a majority of those 32 areas.
Ryan Walters, of course, in every conceivable way, is a disaster for education in Oklahoma, the state itself and, oh yeah — how many binding attorney general opinions has he made necessary? — the rule of law, too.
But without Kevin Stitt, he’s just a former history teacher in charge of a non-profit nobody’s heard of nor pays any mind.
Just maybe, when it’s time to elect another governor, Oklahomans will remember the outgoing governor and his party, the party of the governor before him, who was a failure, too, and finally head a new direction.