New Hampshire’s School Funding Proposal is Unconstitutional

  An interesting editorial appeared in the New Hampshire Union Leader today, here it is reprinted in it’s entirety:

THE CLASSIC Popeye cartoon character named Wimpy had a taste for hamburgers that exceeded his budget. Always short on cash, he would go into a restaurant and utter his famous catch-phrase, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

On Thursday the Legislature passed an education funding plan on the Wimpy payment system. Legislators decided that whoever gets elected to the General Court this fall will gladly pay next year for the school funding plan passed yesterday.

The state currently spends $897 million for education. Legislators on Thursday raised that to $940 million in the 2009-10 school year and $975 million a year in the future. They did so knowing full well that there is no source of additional funding to raise school spending even a dime higher than the amount contained in the existing budget. Current estimates predict a roughly $250 million shortfall in this two-year state budget. So even funding the current level of state education spending will be a challenge, never mind finding an additional $43 million to $78 million.

Where will that extra money come from? That’s for the next Legislature to decide after the next election.

The plan also violates the state constitution as interpreted by the state Supreme Court. It determines how much money the state must give each community to fund an adequate education, then doesn’t fully fund that amount for some communities during a two-year transition period.

The point of the two-year transition is to prevent sudden, enormous fluctuations in local school budgets. Politically, it makes sense. But technically, it violates the Supreme Court’s mandate that the state provide 100 percent of adequate education funding for every community.

It is yet another example of how the Claremont jurisprudence makes reasonable political compromises on school funding virtually impossible.

This whole mess of an education funding plan is the direct result of trying in vain to obey court decisions that make no real-world sense. Education funding is a political exercise. The court has tried to take politics out of it and make it an issue of rights, which creates an untenable situation.

Next year, legislators will find themselves engaged in the political task of finding additional money to fund this politically crafted school spending plan. They will do that under the pretense of ignoring politics and looking only to secure each student’s right to an adequate education.

That is dishonest and absurd.

  There are two things that I find interesting, if not disturbing, about this latest school funding proposal, the first of which is the fact that it violates the state constitution. There is already state supreme court precedence in regards to passing spending legislation without actually finding the means to fund the legislation, which is what this does. The New Hampshire supreme court has already found this to be unconstitutional. Evidently this doesn’t mean too much to the far left moonbats that have taken over control of the state. They don’t care how much something costs, or even how to pay for it. It is for someone else to worry about, as far as they are concerned.

 The second aspect that I find interesting is the fact that they purposely postponed funding this bill until after the election. There is no way in hell the legislators would ever vote to fund this bill before the election. Governor Lynch and the rest of his tax and spend buddies are going to have to institute either a sales or income tax to pay for this. It’s either that or further raise all of the other taxes that Governor Lynch enjoys raising. Either way it would be political suicide to proceed with actually funding this irresponsible legislation, so they will just postpone the spending aspect of the bill until after the election (illegally, mind you.)

 People of New Hampshire, YOU NEED TO WAKE UP, AND WAKE UP RIGHT NOW. Can’t you see what is going on here? The wool is being pulled over your eyes and you are either not paying attention, don’t care, or we have simply become Massachusetts north.

 It is probably all of the above, and it sucks!