Inside Politics

Left out

A family member of a September 11 victim says Senate Democrats invited him to Washington then snubbed him yesterday after he criticized a bill adopting 9/11 commission recommendations.

“They made me sit in the hallway for 40 minutes for nothing,” said Bruce DeCell, a former New York City police officer whose son-in-law was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11.

He was invited by the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee to represent victims’ family members at a lunch and press conference that included Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey.

Mr. DeCell, a board member of the World Trade Center United Family Group and vice president of the 9/11 Families for a Secure America, said he was asked to wait in the hall for his turn at a press conference but ended up waiting until it was over.

“I personally don’t care if I’m at the press conference or not,” he said. “If they don’t want me, they could tell me, and I would just go home.”

Thomas Russell, director of the steering committee, later called and apologized, saying he was “being pulled in too many directions and he forgot to come and get me,” Mr. DeCell said.

Mr. DeCell called the explanation “disingenuous.”

“If there were 20 of us and he forgot one, I’d understand it,” he said. “I was the only family member who traveled down here for this.”

Opting out

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, said yesterday he will advance a bill that will let states opt out of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law.

“We’re going to provide an alternative” to the five-year-old-law, Mr. Hoekstra said at a Heritage Foundation forum. “We think this is the direction to go.”

Mr. Hoekstra said Republicans sold out their principles by allowing No Child Left Behind to become law in the first place, because now that it’s in place it will only grow in both funding and regulations. “We are on the doorstep of having a national federal curriculum,” he said, calling this possibility “devastating.”

The act — which Mr. Bush and some top lawmakers are working to renew this year — aims to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014 by requiring states to test children annually and to set standards that schools must meet each year.

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