The ongoing dispute between the Kansas Legislature and the Kansas Supreme Court over school finance is very dispiriting both to Kansans who care about public education and those who care about the proper functioning of our state government.

Last week, the Legislature held two days of contentious hearings over a proposed constitutional amendment that would remove jurisdiction over school finance from the Supreme Court. While this proposal, if approved, will not solve the immediate problems facing Kansas, it will, at least in the minds of proponents of the amendment, prevent further actions by the Supreme Court in this area.

The problem, of course, is that the proposal, at its core, is an attack on the constitutional structure of government that has been part of this state from its beginnings, and does not address the underlying questions of whether the Legislature has, in fact, made constitutionally adequate provision for financing public education. Instead, the proposal is the product of a combination of anger over what some legislators perceive to be the Supreme Court’s overstepping its constitutional authority to review legislative enactments and a seeming desire that there be no objective review of legislative enactments in the school finance area.

At the heart of the dispute between the Legislature and the court is a fundamental unwillingness of the Legislature to recognize the value of judicial review of legislative enactments and the resultant “checks and balances” that come from such judicial review. During the two days of legislative hearings last week this fundamental difference between the Legislature and the court over the proper role of judicial review became very clear.

I have already written in these pages about my belief that judicial review is an absolute necessity in a free republic and will not repeat those arguments here. What I will say is that I believe that the opposition to judicial review that is now growing stronger in the Legislature is not a true conservative doctrine, but, rather, is quite radical and one of which even the most iconic conservative judges, such as the late Justice Scalia, would not have approved.

This week, the Legislature meets in special session to attempt to find a resolution to its dispute with the Kansas Supreme Court over one portion of the school finance litigation: equity in the distribution of money to schools. I hope that the anger and partisanship that was so obvious at the legislative hearings last week will not carry over into the special session this week.

Education is a critical issue for Kansas. It is, in many respects, the most important investment in the future that the state can make. Anger and disputes between branches of government are problematic enough, but it would indeed be a tragedy if these disputes were to prevent the Legislature from crafting legislation that will ensure that all Kansans receive the education that the Kansas Constitution guarantees them.

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