Kansas couldn't keep it

I just read the Kansas Supreme Court's school funding opinion, and boy is it a hoot. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in separation of powers.

Most of the text of it is dedicated to reviewing the immensely bureaucratic nature of school funding: BSAPP, cost studies, at-risk, bilingual, local option budget, cost of living weightings, and on and on. A true delight. (I'm not being ironic; I'm being sick. It's hiliarious what smart people will do, thinking they're accomplishing something, when in fact they're cratering.)

All of that is what the legislature did, and it's a rubric only Satan could love. Balanced against that is something similar, though discussed only summarily, called the Augenblick & Myers study. Different rubric and yet the same; but it comes up with more money, $853 million worth.

Here's the best part of the whole thing: The court reviews, extensively, the state legislature's work. Not enough, the court says. The court says, cursorily, that the A&M study is the only other cost information it has, so that's what it's going to use. And now, the punchline:

"We further conclude, after careful consideration, that at least one-third of the $853 million amount . . . shall be funded for the 2005-2006 school year."

Think about this. You had a legislature work for however many months on a silly and cumbersome rubric; you had Augenblick and Myers do the same, coming up with something different. Now you've got the supreme court working through it and pulling up the magic number of . . . one-third. There isn't a single word in the opinion to justify that, apart from the court's "careful consideration." I'd love to know what that "careful consideration" consisted of. "Hey, Billy, what do you think? 80 percent?" "Nah, too much. 15 percent tops." "Are you guys both crazy? It ought to be 130 percent minimum." "Look folks, let's put an end to this with paper, scissors, rock."

There isn't a thing about this case that is judicial in any reasonable sense. Stipulate that what the legislature did is stupid, but as lawyers like to say, that proves too much. All of government is stupid. Adding the court on top of the mix just makes it stupid squared.


Update: I forgot my second-favorite part of the Kansas school funding decision. After the Kansas Supreme Court rewrites a law for the legislature, here's how it ends its opinion:

"We readily acknowledge that our present remedy is far from perfect; indeed we acknoweldge that is merely a balancing of several factors."

Those factors are:
* "the ever present need for Kansas school children to receive a constitutionally adequate education"
* "The role of this court as defined in the Kansas Constitution."
* ". . . acknowledgement of the unique difficulties inherent in the legislative process."
* "the press of time caused by the rapidly approaching school year."

Sounds good, right? They're acknowledging the arbitrariness of the process, saying that humans can only do so much, that what this group of seven people does won't vary in any principled sense from what the next group of seven, or 100 or whatever does. More importantly, they're acknowledging that courts and legislatures fill different roles, right?

Nope. Sorry. They're just warning the legislature that no matter what it does, it's the court that makes the decisions, bucko: "Accordingly, we retain jurisdiction of this appeal. If necessary, further action will be taken by this court . . .."