My colleague Joe Cunningham wrote a great piece earlier today about how the Biden regime and the teachers’ unions are suddenly on board with wanting to re-open public schools after seeming to find every reason to stall re-opening over the past year.

This has been a huge deal for parents, even preventing some from going back to work, because they have to stay home with kids who are not in school. It finally seems to be reaching the Biden regime how negatively this is impacting opinion of them in the public. That increased particularly after the report about how much influence the AFT may have had in the CDC guidance and the Biden position on reopening schools.

Randi Weingarten has stood in the way, arguing she wanted to “keep teachers safe,” meanwhile ignoring the horrible impact that not being in school in person has had on so many kids. As we reported in March, she was reluctant to accept the CDC guidance reducing the social distancing requirements in schools from six feet to three feet. Then earlier this month, emails came out showing how much the AFT had influenced the final CDC language on the latest school reopening guidance — that in some cases the language was “nearly verbatim” included with what the AFT suggested. “You could see why that would lead people to think that you all have a lot of muscle over at the White House when it comes to reopening our schools,” Fox’s Martha MacCallum said in an interview with Weingarten.

Now, there’s more on just how deep that influence was, from the mouth of Randi Weingarten herself in an interview with C-Span. Weingarten argued that it was normal for them to be asked for their opinion, except in the “last administration.” The interviewer, Pedro Echevarria, seemed a bit incredulous at her defense and grilled her about the emails which had originally been reported by the NY Post, including the language being taken “nearly verbatim” from what the AFT had suggested. He asked, “You call that normal as far as the ability to do that?”

HUGE: AFT’s @rweingarten tells CSPAN the Biden Admin “asked for language” they could use in the CDC’s guidance on school re-openings (which was used "nearly verbatim").

"They asked us for language and we gave them language when they asked for it." pic.twitter.com/CdYXpL9htu

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 18, 2021

“They asked us for language and we gave them language when they asked us for it,” Weingarten said. Yeah, no, that’s not normal. It’s normal to get stakeholder opinion. It isn’t normal for an administration to ask for language and then take it “nearly verbatim.” The fact that she doesn’t see the issue with it means it’s something they’ve likely been doing for a while and they’ve had outsized influence except in the “last administration.”

Again Weingarten claimed this was about “safety.” But there have been schools open across the country without issue. The science is that children have a very low risk of transmission. She simply ignored those long-known facts, regardless of the children who got hurt in the process.

Weingarten stresses there’s “nothing nefarious” about what they did, saying it’s “normal” to seek their input on policy.

But the CDC was supposedly issuing science-based guidance, nothing more. https://t.co/SsY8xiRwkE

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 18, 2021

That’s the bottom line — the CDC guidance is supposed to be based solely on the science, not on the political influences.

It looked bad before with the emails. It looks worse now with her own words.