Grok Poll Results: Amend the NH Constitution to Get the Courts Out of Education Funding? - Granite Grok

Grok Poll Results: Amend the NH Constitution to Get the Courts Out of Education Funding?

GrokPoll Results Ed Funding Constitutional amend

Not a lot of votes on this one but the overall consensus of those who took the time is that they would “support an effort to get the courts out of the educational funding morass.”

Brave souls, knowing as they do that Constitutional amendments – heck, Constitutions – are not what they once were.

To that end, there were a few comments added in the ‘other’ field which I’ve shared on the jump.

“Get the courts out and make it a part of the state budget proposal which has ro be passed by the house and the senate and signed by the government.”

“Remove public education from the NH constitution entirely.”

We also had a response on Facebook worth sharing, from Ian Underwood.

Write down a list of every reason why government should be required to keep its hands off religion: it’s too much power for any government to have, it’s too personal and individual to be politicized, no one knows for sure what the ‘right’ answers are (so the cost of forcing a wrong answer on everyone would be catastrophic), and so on.

Then change ‘religion’ to ‘education’. All the reasons still apply, and in some cases, even more so than for religion.

So my amendment would say something like: ‘No agency or agent of government may fund, regulate, operate, or interfere in any way with religion or education’.

As Steve notes (and as I point out all the time), the courts could simply ignore that by redefining words (like ‘no’ or ‘in any way’), but until the legislature grows a pair and takes back its legislative power from the courts, there’s nothing to be done about that.

I like Ian’s amendment but as he and I point out, it hardly matters what words you use when the Judges you are trying to restrain continue to find new meanings for words (like ‘no’ or ‘in any way’) without fear of retribution.

Sure, the legislature has the power to vacate the entire judiciary if it has the votes but unlike judges they feel restrained by the progressive ruling class (of which judges are part and parcel) who like things the way they are now and who are far better at intimidation.

We don’t have to “cherish” the arrangement we have now, but there are no easy solutions to the mess we made when the court gave us Claremont and the Legislature didn’t (or more accurately had no desire to) immediately kick the whole lot of them to the curb.

What we may be left with is waiting for “Claremont 5.3 – The Taxpayer’s Revenge” to find its way to a more appealing set of State Supreme Court Justices which we’ll never reasonably have and isn’t that exactly at the heart of the matter when it comes to Judicial activism?

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