Because he sometimes seemed to care more about people he didn’t represent than people he did:
He is a seven-term U.S. representative and a prominent Republican, but Tom Davis hasn’t forgotten what it was like to grow up as one of five children in a struggling family, with a father serving time in prison.
“We had no money,” Davis (R-Va.) said recently at a reception, recounting how he went to Amherst College thanks to a scholarship. “I understand what it means to be a young kid, when you talk about college, and make that a reality.”
Davis is a champion of a federally funded initiative that has sent thousands of D.C. residents to college. He and other supporters of the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program were honored at the reception this month in the Senate.
The program, launched in 2000 and recently renewed, provides tuition subsidies of up to $10,000 per year to D.C. residents to attend public colleges elsewhere in the country. It offers smaller amounts to those choosing private colleges in the D.C. metropolitan area or historically black colleges around the nation. It aims to compensate for the District’s lack of a full public university system.
Why the tax dollars of people in Virginia’s 11th District, or anywhere else for that matter, should be used for a program that has absolutely no benefit for them (and arguably harms them to the extent a D.C. resident takes a space that would have gone to an in-state student) has, of course, never been answered.
