It’s kind of quiet, as these things go, but Kansas is suddenly in the middle of a state constitutional crisis.
After a grueling legislative session, Gov. Laura Kelly last week signed a school funding bill into law. That’s the good news. Controversially, though, she used a line-item veto to eliminate a provision of the bill that would suddenly — some say unexpectedly — alter the state’s school finance formula to cut funding Kansas school districts with declining enrollments.
Letting that part of the bill pass, Kelly said, would have “immediate devastating effects” on many of the state’s rural schools.
Here’s where the crisis part comes in: The Kansas Constitution gives the governor the authority to veto individual items in appropriations bills. The school funding bill is obviously an appropriations bill. But the section of the legislation that Kelly vetoed didn’t itself appropriate any money.
It was a policy provision, you see. That’s different.
Kelly says she has the authority to veto the policy because it was part of an appropriations bill. But the Legislature’s Republican leaders don’t agree. They have asked Attorney General Kris Kobach — their party ally, one who lost the governor’s race to Kelly in 2018 — to issue a formal opinion on whether Kelly exceeded the limits on her power. It’s not hard to guess how that will turn out.
After that happens, possibly as soon as this week, the whole thing probably will be decided by the courts.
It’s a real mess.
This is the part of the column where I might be expected to say who is right and who is wrong in this dispute. But I don’t really know. Kelly is certainly testing the limits of her power in a way we haven’t really seen before.
But I do know that it was Republicans — the folks who control the Kansas Legislature — who made this mess.
The bill that Kelly approved in part and vetoed in part is the result of a process that seems custom-designed to produce the chaos we’re seeing now. Legislative leaders routinely mix funding and policy provisions in education legislation instead of passing “clean” funding bills sought by school leaders across the state.
And as The Star’s Katie Bernard points out, Kansas Republicans — forever looking to undermine public education and pass the money to homeschoolers and private schools — in recent years “have passed the education budget separately from the (state’s) main budget as a way to impose education policy that may not be able to pass on its own.”
The process wasn’t producing results Republicans wanted. So they changed the process.
But maybe “process” is too generous a word to use here. This particular school funding bill came together in the frenetic late hours of the legislative session, with predictably bad results. The disputed provision — which changes the way school districts count their students, which in turn dictates how much state money they get — came as a surprise to state educators who were already working on their 2022-23 school budgets.
Many lawmakers didn’t really understand what they had voted for until after the bill passed.
“I think that was one of those unintended consequences that happen at the very end of a legislative process when people are just not understanding the implications,” GOP state Sen. Brenda Dietrich, a former school superintendent, told The Topeka Capital-Journal. “I had no idea there would be that many districts that would be impacted.”
This is not a dry academic exercise. As many as 100 of the state’s school districts reportedly will struggle to come up with potentially dramatic last-second budget cuts, if indeed a court rules the governor exceeded her authority.
