Kansans looking for any significant new information or action to come from a legislative investigation of contacts between two state senators and a state Supreme Court justice are likely to be disappointed.

Two days of hearings this week by a Kansas House committee appear to have been a colossal waste of time. The most significant revelation of the sessions so far is that legislators are far less interested in what communications took place with the court than they are with how the senators might have used reports of such communications to gain political advantage for their own school finance plans.

The committee chaired by Rep. Mike O’Neal, R-Hutchinson, has had mixed success in extracting any new information or even convincing people to testify at its hearings. So far, the key players in the case, Senate President Steve Morris, R-Hugoton and Sen. Pete Brungardt, R- Salina, have declined to speak to the committee, saying the Kansas Constitution shields all legislators from having to justify their votes or answer for their speech.

The driving force behind the House hearings this week was Sen. Jim Barnett, an Emporia Republican who is seeking the nomination for governor this year. Barnett is claiming there is evidence that Morris had more than the single conversation he already has acknowledged with Justice Lawton Nuss concerning school finance legislation. No other witness this week supported that theory.

Barnett’s focus, however, is not so much on Morris’ contacts with the court as about how the Senate president used allusions to that contact to support his own school finance plan and tip the balance away from an alternative plan presented by Barnett. The Emporia senator probably had hoped to use a high-profile victory on school finance to help fuel his gubernatorial campaign and is peeved that he was denied that platform.

The hearings appear to be another symptom of the damaging split between moderate and conservative factions of the state’s Republican Party. Conservative House members are teaming up with Barnett to chastise the more moderate Morris and Brungardt.

It’s hard to understand what the House hearings hope to accomplish. Unless money changed hands, there doesn’t seem to be the possibility of an ethics violation by Morris or Brungardt. The House isn’t in a position to discipline Nuss, who already has recused himself from the school finance case. Any disciplinary action against Nuss will come as a result of an investigation under way in the judicial branch.

It seems that the primary motivation of the hearings is for certain Republicans to try to score political points at the expense of fellow Republicans. This is not an unhappy circumstance for Democrats. When asked whether the hearings should continue as scheduled later this month, Rep. Mike Peterson, a Kansas City Democrat and vice chairman of the investigating committee, said he supposed they should “so people don’t think we are wasting their money, which we are.”

Given the results so far, it’s hard not to agree with Peterson’s assessment that the House investigation is a waste of Kansas resources.