Her qualifications go well beyond her value as a Democratic political operative and her union’s capacity to fundraise for the president’s party.
Before we go assuming that American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten lacks the national-defense credentials to justify her appointment to a Department of Homeland Security council focused on “emergency management” and “preparedness measures” in American schools, we should take a beat. Throughout her career, Weingarten has demonstrated foresight and vigilance in guarding against threats to America’s schoolchildren and the nation as a whole.
For example, consider the National School Boards Association’s warning to President Joe Biden in the fall of 2021 that some parents of students might have become radicalized by both pandemic-related restrictions on in-person schooling and the efforts in that period to introduce politically divisive social commentary into public-school curricula. The NSBA had seen an increase in “extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings.” And if those attendees or anyone else made threats against school-board members, that’s not just a criminal offense — it “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the NSBA advised. The association endorsed the application of federal law-enforcement tools, like those provided to the executive branch after 9/11 in the PATRIOT Act, to investigate and prosecute potential offenders.
“Thank you #DOJ,” Weingarten tweeted while referencing an October 2021 memo authored by Joe Biden’s attorney general in response to the NSBA’s advisement. To her credit, Weingarten stripped the Justice Department’s memo of its plausible claim to have been inspired only by credible threats of violence. “Merrick Garland tackles threats to educators amid critical race theory furor,” she declared. The NSBA eventually apologized for the memo, but Weingarten has not backtracked. Some might call that intransigence, but others would surely praise her for showing courage in her conviction that the distinctions between a concerned parent and a domestic terrorist are matters of degree.
It is also worth dwelling on the (admittedly few) issues she has discussed publicly that relate directly to national defense on both the domestic front and abroad.
First, at home: “White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security,” Weingarten observed in September 2020. She cited a draft document produced internally and leaked to Lawfare editor Ben Wittes, who criticized the documents for actually diminishing “the prominence of white supremacy relative to other domestic violent extremism,” which he attributed to influence from the Trump administration. Given the perpetrators of U.S.-based mass-casualty events in recent years, that might have been prudent. But Weingarten declined to revise her assessment then, and she’s not revising it now.
When it comes to overseas threats, the future DHS adviser has trained her eyes on the skies — not in any vigilance against incoming, but in case of inclement weather. The dispatch that caught Weingarten’s attention via the Union of Concerned Scientists cited 2,800 cases of heat stroke among America’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel in 2019 to demonstrate why climate change is one of the foremost readiness challenges faced by the armed forces. For over a decade, Democratic partisan activists have warned that climate change is not just a threat multiplier but a threat in and of itself to U.S. national security, regardless of the assessments of defense professionals. Making climate-related predictions is a fraught enterprise — a fact to which the Defense Department’s own flawed climate predictions attest. But lack of certainty can impede action, and action is what is needed now.
The assets Randi Weingarten will bring to DHS are manifold and self-evident. Her qualifications for the post extend well beyond her value as a Democratic political operative, and her inclusion on this council probably has nothing to do with her union’s capacity to fundraise for the president’s party. We need Weingarten on that wall. Surely, we will all be safer when she is.