While the battles over critical race theory have, for the most part, occurred at the state and local levels, two conservative lawmakers are taking up the fight in Congress. Today, NR has learned, Representative Dan Bishop (R., N.C.) and Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) are set to reintroduce two anti-CRT bills, both of which were originally introduced by the Republican lawmakers in the last legislative session: the Stop CRT Act, which would prohibit federal funding for schools and universities that promote CRT-based concepts, and the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act, which would bar the use of similar ideas in military institutions, including service academies.

The two bills reenter the fray with a deep bench of support in the Republican caucus, with each boasting dozens of co-sponsors. "Critical race theory (CRT) is a poisonous ideology that seeks to divide Americans based on their skin color, and it must be ripped out, root and branch, from our institutions," Bishop told NR in a statement. "The Biden administration and radical Left's relentless promotion of these racist, anti-American ideologies is toxic to our country and culture. These bills are one crucial part of our fight against the insidious effort from the Left to fundamentally transform society based on their designs."

The Stop CRT Act, as Education Week reported in 2021, "would prohibit federal funds from going to schools that teach students that one race is inherently inferior or superior to another, that someone is inherently oppressive or racist because of his or her racial identity, that America is a fundamentally racist country, or that promote critical race theory in general," as well as codifying Trump's executive order barring CRT-inspired trainings for federal-government employees and contractors. The Combating Racist Training in the Military Act would bar the military from including similar concepts "in trainings or other professional settings, if their inclusion would reasonably appear as an endorsement," and prohibit "hiring consultants to teach such theories, compelling individuals to profess belief in such theories, or segregating individuals on the basis of race in any setting," according to a 2021 press release from Cotton's office.

Conservatives should welcome the concerted anti-CRT push from federal lawmakers such as Bishop and Cotton. Thus far, state-level Republicans have generally served as the vanguard in the fight against the left-wing education bureaucracy. With their direct control of state universities and public schools, and a relative lack of bureaucratic barriers and competing national interests to navigate, Republican majorities at the state level have begun to target radical pedagogies with a slate of anti-CRT laws, restrictions on ideas derived from gender ideology, and even efforts to defund social-justice programs, gender-studies departments, and the "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) bureaucracy.

But to dismantle the sprawling apparatus that produced CRT, conservatives will have to confront the system at the source. The federal bureaucracy's ubiquitous presence in modern American life has made it the primary benefactor of radical programs under both Republican and Democratic presidencies and congressional majorities, often slipping under the radar with euphemistic titles that conceal their real function. Today, an astonishing quantity of government programs end up lining the pockets of left-wing activists, from targeted education grants and Covid-relief funds to the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. A tally from the Claremont Institute estimates that over $4.3 billion in federal funding has been lavished on progressive causes — CRT and gender-studies education grants, DEI or "culturally responsive" reeducation boot camps, LGBT advocacy groups, and so on — since 2016.

This subsidization of progressivism, as Congressman Jim Banks (R., Ind.) noted in the American Mind last month, "is spent not only to spread anti-American doctrines which will tear the nation apart; it also funds a class of activists, paying their salaries so they can be a perpetual revolutionary class." And "astonishingly," Banks added, "Congress sent more funding to woke institutions and activities in 2017 and 2018, when Republicans controlled both chambers, than it did in 2019 and 2020 with Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker's chair. This Congress, we should aim to eliminate all such funding."

In a refreshingly simple way, that's what the Stop CRT Act and the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act aim to do: cut off CRT's lifeline at the national level by ending its access to the gravy train of federal dollars, routing the ideology from influential government institutions such as the Department of Defense and the broader military bureaucracy, and applying restrictions to the concepts that CRT espouses rather than the narrow definition of CRT itself.

With a Democratic Senate majority, to say nothing of an octogenarian president whose administration has a bottomless appetite for anti-American racialism, the odds of the aforementioned Republican bills passing this session are about as good as those of a blizzard slamming Death Valley. But with only a one-chamber Republican majority, conservative statecraft in the 118th Congress is going to have to mean something other than just passing laws. In a moment when the GOP appears to have very little idea of who it is and what it stands for, so-called messaging bills such as the pair introduced by Bishop and Cotton have a two-pronged disciplining and consensus-making function: First, they rally a disorganized and internally divided Republican Party around a specific set of priorities; and second, they forge the outlines of a new Republican agenda, legitimating the policy proposals with the popular support of the caucus.

They also set the tone. Legacy media have consistently sounded the alarm about the "chilling effect" that state-level anti-CRT laws inflict on teachers. But that's a feature, rather than a bug, of these efforts — a "chilling effect" on the proliferation of CRT means that the bans are having their intended effect. Republicans at every level of government should be seeking to put the CRT regime on notice. Gone are the days when taxpayer-funded progressive activism can persist without meaningful resistance from the Right. One way or another, this country is headed for a reckoning over the corruption of its education system.