The Kansas Legislature and governor shouldn’t have been surprised by last week’s ruling that threatens to close down the state court system. Their tampering with the authority of the judicial branch to manage state courts already was the topic of a court challenge when lawmakers recklessly decided to tie this year’s court budget to the outcome of that case.

To avoid an immediate crisis, Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks agreed to stay his ruling, which means that state courts will remain open, at least for now, but this issue is far from closed.

Wednesday’s ruling addresses a 2014 law that requires judges in each of the state’s 31 judicial districts to pick their own chief judge. That power previously had been held by the Kansas Supreme Court. Because the law was seen as an attack on the authority granted to the Supreme Court in the Kansas Constitution, a district judge in Kingman County challenged the law’s constitutionality.

While that case still was pending, Kansas lawmakers tied the outcome of that case to the entire judicial budget for the current fiscal year. Instead of including the judicial budget in the overall state budget, they put it in a separate bill that included the altered system for selecting chief judges. And they added a “nonseverability” clause so that if any part of the bill was declared invalid, the entire bill would be null and void. In other words, if Judge Hendricks ruled that the change in choosing chief judges was unconstitutional, the entire judicial budget would be thrown out.

Despite the Legislature’s coercive tactics, Hendricks ruled on Wednesday that taking away the Supreme Court’s power to appoint chief judges violated the separation of powers doctrine, as well as the Kansas Constitution, which says, “The supreme court shall have general administrative authority over all courts in the state.”

As noted at the outset, the governor and Legislature probably were not surprised by this outcome. The highly unusual act of tying the outcome of this case to the judicial budget was intended to challenge the powers of the state court. That is a politically popular idea among conservative Republicans and even if the state lost the case, legislators who supported the power play would win points for trying to rein in the court.

Never mind that, in this case, it is the governor and Legislature, not the courts, that are trying to exceed their constitutional powers.

The next step in this drama is expected to be another court action seeking to have the nonseverability clause struck down. If that action is successful, the judicial branch’s budget probably would be reinstated and the courts would continue to operate. If that doesn’t happen, however, the Legislature might have to step in and fix the mess it created — a situation that might even require a special session at taxpayer expense.

Separation of powers is a core principle of democratic government. The judicial branch was intended to be shielded from the shifts in the political majority that governs the legislative and executive branches. That’s an important separation that needs to be protected.