Representative government is supposed to involve considerable give and take, but in the case of the Kansas Arts Commission, Gov. Sam Brownback apparently is unwilling to give an inch.

Soon after he took office, Brownback used an executive order to abolish the Arts Commission and replace it with a nonprofit entity. After hearing plenty from their constituents, members of the Kansas Senate won a temporary stay for the commission by voting to override that executive order.

There is, however, more than one way to get rid of the Kansas Arts Commission.

The Kansas House initially wanted to accomplish that goal by cutting off funding to the group. Going into late-session budget negotiations, the Senate’s budget included funding for the commission and the House’s did not. Early in the negotiations, however, the House agreed to put the funding back in.

It’s possible that House members were willing to make that concession because they were confident that the governor wouldn’t let that piece of the budget stand. One option would have been for Brownback to use his line-item veto to remove that funding from the budget, but such a veto could have been considered and possibly overridden by the legislators.

So Brownback decided to apply a more permanent solution by simply directing the Kansas Department of Administration to terminate the employment of all five arts commission employees. The employees were laid off immediately and told that their jobs would be terminated on June 10. With or without funding in the budget, it’s pretty hard to run an agency with no employees.

The action was a rude surprise to the chairman of the Arts Commission, who called it a “back-door move” to eliminate the commission. That seems like an accurate portrayal.

At this point, it should be clear that, for whatever reason, Brownback is determined to kill the Kansas Arts Commission even though it supplies jobs across the state and contributes significantly to the quality of life in rural communities he says he is trying to promote in other ways. Nonetheless, a spokeswoman for his office says Brownback “stands by his budget recommendation as the best way to cause the arts to flourish privately in Kansas while saving taxpayer dollars.”

Brownback may believe this, but when both houses of the Legislature — not to mention the many Kansans who have protested the action — disagree, it behooves a governor to reconsider his position. There certainly are times for a governor to take a hard stand, but this isn’t one of those times.

The $700,000 funding for the Kansas Arts Commission represents only a tiny fraction of the overall state budget. Brownback should honor the democratic process that has returned this item to the budget rather than employing autocratic tactics to bypass that process — and the wishes of many Kansans.