Len Lance - NJ's Least Effective Representative

Regarding Leonard Lance's vote against the education funding law, a commenter here posts:

did you know that NJ-7 would receive funding to hire 56 teachers TOTAL?

that's one teacher for every municipality in NJ-7. ONE teacher.

Couple that with the deep cuts in food stamp funding and you get a bad bill and Lance was correct to oppose the bill.

The NEA published DOE estimates that show 3,900 education jobs would be allocated to NJ in this funding. Then the NEA estimated, based on Title I funding, that 56 of those jobs would go to Leonard Lance's district, NJ-7. About 1.4%.

Lance is stomping his feet:

He also said the National Education Association estimated that Lance's congressional district would see 56 teachers hired. Lance said with 54 municipalities in his district, many of which have more than one school, that would result in one new teacher per municipality.

But the NEA admits funding need not be distributed via Title I; the state could decide how to distribute it, which is Christie's justification for supporting it. You would think that Lance, rather than whining about how his district is getting screwed, would be out pressing either the feds or the governor to make sure the school districts in the 7th were getting funds.

Or does he think getting money back to his district is not his job? Because his opponent, Ed Potosnak, seems to think it is:

Confronted with National Education Association (NEA) numbers showing that the money would enable the 54 towns in the 7th District to retain or rehire 56 teachers, or roughly one per town, Postosnak said, "If Leonard Lance doesn't think that's enough, what is he going to do to get us more (teachers)? He's done nothing to save jobs."

Well, you know, aside from tax cuts for the wealthy - because that has worked so well in the past...

Adding: Read the whole report from the Patch about Lance's town hall in Summit. It's nice to see people showing up at these things who are not going to swallow the right-wing crap that's being fed to them through cable news anymore. Maybe if they show up next time with tea bags on their heads the big newspapers will find it worthy to report on them.