As more and more columns in the print media and sound bites on radio and television are filled with the drumbeats of impending war, other crises begin to fade from the state and national consciousness. As important as war and terrorism are, however, the domestic economy presents, in many ways, as much of a potential danger for many Americans. This is nowhere more true than here in our own beloved Kansas.

For months now, the state fiscal picture has worsened. Month after month, tax receipts decline. Cut after cut is made in state operations to the point where we have long ago gone through all the metaphorical fat and entered into the muscle, gristle, and bone. Such budgetary surgery is slowly crippling the state and changing the very nature of how we all live.

In recent weeks, the local news media have begun to call out for leadership and courage at the state level, particularly in the Legislature. It would seem, that, in spite of the crisis we all find ourselves in, many of our legislators think that their primary job is to carry on the business of politics as usual and to do their best to avoid any course of action that might endanger their legislative positions. This may well result in catastrophe for the state and its people.

The Legislature, as an example, is sticking stubbornly to its unwillingness to raise taxes needed to fund such crucial areas as human services, health, the judiciary, and education. As a result, school districts are being forced to ask for increases in local taxes, taxes that may fall particularly and unfairly hard on the elderly and others on fixed incomes.

Weekly, we read of schools having bake sales and charity auctions to provide services to students that any right-minded person would agree should be the obligation of the state. The most vulnerable members of our society, children, the ill, the elderly, are losing services that they have come to depend upon and which are often crucial to their existence and their futures.

It is not realistic to expect private individuals and private charities to pick up the slack. A politician in another state, when confronted with the fact that schools could no longer afford to purchase textbooks, said bluntly that books should be the responsibility of parents and if they cannot afford them, that’s their problem.

What kind of public school system does that create? Shall we simply decide that the poor should not have books? Yet we are not far from that here in Kansas. Indeed, as schools begin to “rent” books to children, we are coming dangerously close to this. As to the ability of charities to make up losses in state funding, we need only look to the recent news that the Kansas University Endowment Association has been forced by the economy to cut 20 percent from its past payments to KU.

The purpose of government is to govern. The act of governance requires courage and leadership. It requires the will to act and act as necessary when necessary. It is becoming increasingly clear that some members of our Legislature lack this will. Perhaps, therefore, it is time for the people of Kansas to take radical action.

Perhaps the time has come to think about the need for a change in the very structure of our government, even if this requires constitutional change. There are alternative forms and structures to those we have now. Would a longer term for members of the House give them more backbone? Or, perhaps, term limits ought to be imposed? Ought we to consider even the more radical step of doing away with the bicameral legislature entirely and moving to a single body elected for a period of time sufficient to take members minds off the next election and focus them on current problems?

Are there other structural reforms that might provide us with the leadership we so desperately need? I believe that it is time for the people of Kansas to recognize that we have a problem that is not limited to the current fiscal crisis and that goes to the very heart of our system of government. We seem unable to find enough legislators with the courage to lead in difficult times. I believe, therefore, that we must decide what are the causes of this lack of leadership and begin a serious effort at governmental reform to correct this dangerous situation.

Mike Hoeflich, a professor in the Kansas University School of Law, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.