My full interview with Melissa Blasek will air Monday at 8 pm. In it, she dissects a few of the good, bad, and ugly points in HB2, the trailer bill that functions as a legislative scow, dragging every bit of leftover garbage from the session across the finish line.
Don’t take that the wrong way, I’m just not a fan of Christmastree/Omnibus legislating, but I accept that this is how things get done, and this humble blogger isn’t likely to change that. Almost everyone in the process likes it (when they get their way), and absent a law, no one will ever propose or pass; this is how we do business.
Some of the business is good, some bad, and…some ugly, and that’s as subjective as your party of preference.
Melissa and I had some fun with it, a few laughs, a couple of eye rolls, and ended with a decent review of some of the wins and a few losses. At the end of the process, it’s what we have, and our job is to distill that and address what still needs fixing, doing, or undoing, and work toward changes in the next session.
Make sure to check it out on Monday evening, but until then, one of the huge wins I’ve teased for tomorrow’s show is what is alluded to in the headline.
Here is the text from HB2.
389 Legislative Declaration of Authority Regarding Public Education. In its 1993 and 1997 decisions, in the so-called Claremont series of public school funding cases, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that the New Hampshire Constitution imposes upon the legislature 4 obligations with respect to public K-12 education: (1) define an adequate education; (2) determine its cost; (3) fund it with constitutional taxes; and (4) ensure its delivery through accountability. Although the legislature has from the beginning had grave reservations as to the court’s authority to impose these obligations upon a coordinate branch of government, in the spirit of comity it has over the subsequent quarter-century devoted extensive time, energy and public tax dollars to satisfying them. However, in the most recent of these cases, the judicial branch has asserted authority to review and set aside the legislature’s determinations with respect to its 4 supposed obligations, and to fund education at levels determined by the court through a process which, though adjudicatory in form, is legislative in substance. Accordingly, the legislature now deems it necessary to definitively proclaim that, as the sole branch of government constitutionally competent to establish state policy and to raise and appropriate public funds to carry out such policy, the legislature shall make the final determination of what the state’s educational policies shall be and of the funding needed to carry out such policies.
And, as Melissa says, What are You Gonna DO about it?
The answer is nothing.
The Legislature has reclaimed its authority and will decide what the people want it to do about Article 83 of the State Constitution.
“it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country;
No court I’m aware of in modern times has ever demanded that we adequately fund seminaries, by the way, nor has it addressed the matter of how the monopolistic public school system (a monopoly that is illegal per Art 83, and we’ve bene whittling away at for years) counters the equal demand that we encourage private institutions (which must include education at all levels).
The courts don’t seem to care about all the words, especially those that assign tax and law-making power to the legislature. They’ve gotten away with meddling here, and that is, at least on paper, coming to an end.
Whatever you think of HB 2, and if you watched my interview with Leah Cushman last week, you may have a few reservations – you should – that bolded sentence above is a huge deal, one that no one out in the wilds discussed to my knowledge during the entire process of issues or concerns about the language in HB2.
They kept it unusually quiet. Almost secret, or it would seem.
Big win.
Let’s see what they do with it.
