The Press of Atlantic City’s Editorial Board first published this here.

Teachers and their politicized union, the New Jersey Education Association, have spent many years attempting to buy elections, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

In the previous election for seats in the state Legislature in 2021, teachers gave their allied Democratic candidates in the region’s 1st and 2nd Districts a 5 to 1 advantage in campaign spending.

That money was routed through a Washington, D.C., super political action committee, or Super PAC, the General Majority PAC. But of the $3.9 million that committee had spent by the election, $3.5 million of it had come from Garden State Forward. That’s a “dark money” organization controlled by the NJEA, the state’s largest teachers union and biggest spender by far on campaigns.

Spending five times as much money wasn’t enough, though. The teachers union also falsely accused 2nd District Assembly candidate Claire Swift of responsibility for killing children while she was an attorney for the Division of Youth and Family Services — even though she served the agency in Atlantic County and the deaths occurred in North Jersey and Camden County!

“The Democrats did themselves no favor with the mailer that was from the NJEA PAC, attacking Claire Swift,” said John Froonjian, director of the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University. “It was so over the top. When you accuse somebody of being responsible for killing children, even in this clouded political environment, that cuts through. … The Democratic team had an opportunity to neutralize that but didn’t.” The immoral NJEA-Democrats effort failed and Swift was elected.

Teachers fund the Garden State Forward Super PAC with their regular dues to the NJEA. From 2013 to 2020, Garden State Forward spent $58 million of teachers’ dues on politics, according to the Sunlight Policy Center of New Jersey. Millions more was spent supporting Gov. Phil Murphy’s reelection in 2021.

The teachers and their union have a nice racket. They give money from taxpayers almost exclusively to Democratic candidates, and after they’re elected those representatives give lavish pay and benefits to the union and its teachers. Then a small portion of that money from taxpayers (still many millions) is diverted to supporting candidates who do the bidding of teachers and their union, and the cycle begins again.

New Jersey elected leaders embraced this racket long ago, despite a warning not to do so by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It showers them with money and support, and allows them to pay less attention to what the public wants and better evade accountability to voters.

An interesting 2017 exception to funding only Democrats showed that what’s in it for teachers trumps even their strong political beliefs. Garden State Forward spent $5 million on Trump-supporting Republican Fran Grenier’s attempt to unseat then-Senate President and Democrat Steve Sweeney. Sweeney was being punished for not putting the interests of teachers above all others.

Even exercising this much power over Democrats and through them over New Jersey state and local governments, though, apparently isn’t enough. Now the N.J. Education Association is putting its teachers, their money and their get-out-the-vote help into a push to make the union’s president the governor of New Jersey.

NJEA President Sean Spiller has been running for public office in Montclair since 2012, where he was elected mayor after outspending his opponent 30 to 1. The Garden State Forward Super PAC has been the primary funding vehicle for his personal political campaigns. In a healthy organization, this would be a conflict of interest. But among teachers and their union officials, no conflict apparently is possible because they all share the same overpowering self-interest.

As a Super PAC, Garden State Forward has minimal disclosure requirements, making it a channel for dark money from unnamed sources. This hides the role of such donors in elections and public advocacy campaigns, and opens another big door to corruption. Now the NJEA has formed another dark money Super PAC apparently to support its president’s campaign for governor called “Protecting Our Democracy” (as in democracy by and for the teachers). This prompted the New Jersey Globe to call Spiller a “possible candidate for the 2025 Democratic nomination for governor” and NJ Spotlight News to say he has “his eyes on a gubernatorial run.”

All of this is against the interests of anyone who is not a teacher or member of this or another union seeking power it shouldn’t have.