Democrats care about the poor (or, more precisely, they say they care), especially when election time rolls around. Mind you, they don’t care about them enough that they’d actually want to solve their poverty (four decades of throwing money at the problem, it’s just as bad, if not worse, today than it was when modern-day liberalism was first spawned from the depths of hell). They say they care about them, and that should be enough for anyone, thank you very much.

But as much as the Dems claim to love the downtrodden (or, more precisely, their votes), they love Unions a lot more:

We wrote last week about Democratic efforts to strip 1,900 low-income Washington children of $7,500 “opportunity scholarships” to attend private schools.

It’s an experiment in school vouchers, an experiment with little potential downside. But it’s an experiment that was launched in 2004 by a Republican-controlled Congress. Today it’s on the verge of extinction because the Democratic-controlled Congress wants to do the bidding of public-school teachers unions. The unions see vouchers that let poor kids go to private schools as aiding the enemy.

Language passed by the House as part of a massive $410 billion spending bill would effectively doom the federally funded program. The 1,900 kids would have to leave their schools and re-enter public schools in Washington, which has some of the worst schools in the nation.

(snip)

The Democrats’ point is not to save money—at $14 million a year, the effort represents a trivial share of the budget. The point is to prevent the spread of vouchers.

Why are the Democrats opposed to giving parents the choice of where to send their kids? I mean, after all, choice is what they’re supposedly all about, isn’t it? Or are they just pro-choice when it comes to things they like, like abortion? You already know the answer to that, I suppose. Democrats and the left are pro-choice when it’s something that works for them and their agenda. When it doesn’t, meh, not so much.

Democrats are opposed to this because it empowers parents to make decisions about their kids’ education, and Democrats cannot abide parents being, well, parents. To liberals, that’s the job of the state. They’re also opposed to this because a better education means that these kids will grow up and — gasp! — not be poor! Why, they may not vote Democrat, either! Horror of horrors!

But, in the end, the Democrats are mostly opposed to this because they’re in the hip-pocket of Unions. Whether it’s the auto unions, the food unions, the service unions, or the teachers unions, it doesn’t matter. When a Union says “jump!, Democrats say “how high?”. And the teacher’s unions are adamantly opposed to this. Why, you ask? Because, as I already said, it empowers parents to make choices about their children’s education. And we can’t have that!

Bad teachers and bad schools, in the present system, face no consequences of being bad. Teachers are rarely, if ever, fired for being incompetent boobs because of the unions. Without giving parents a choice, schools have no incentive to get it together. You give parents the choice, and all of a sudden, schools will be competing with one another for students. And the way to do that is, surprise-surprise, by getting better. By improving their faculty, getting rid of the riff-raff who pass for teachers, and making the schools safe for kids to attend.

When competition — a dirty word to a liberal — is allowed, everybody wins. Except, of course, the unions and the hacks that belong to them.

RedState has a list of who voted against this.