Opinon- Constitution keeps power-grabbers in check

Kansas City Star, The (MO) - July 11, 2005

Author: JOHN SEGALE

The misguided souls in the Kansas Legislature who support amending the Kansas Constitution to
prevent the courts from ruling on the financing of public education are attempting to knock one of the
legs off the three-legged stool of our democracy.
The power grab that is being attempted by these "representatives" supports nothing less than
tyranny. Why?
The founders of our nation were cognizant of tyrannical government, be it a dictatorship of a single
monarch or of a majority faction within a legislative body. They wisely placed the courts into our
constitutional system to act as a check upon both the executive and legislative branches of
government.
The faction in Topeka is attempting to carve out for itself an area of the Kansas Constitution that is
immune from judicial scrutiny.
This crowd wants to avoid legal accountability for its actions as applied to the financing and
distribution of education expenditures.
The faction apparently argues that the power of the electorate will be a sufficient check on its power.
And it is trying to fool each of us into thinking that the court is taking our power away instead of
checking the legislative faction's power.
The tyrannical faction is indeed clever.
Use your imagination and think for a minute about how a majority in the Legislature could use its
unchecked power.
It is conceivable that they could decide to discriminatorily tax the "wealthy" inhabitants of Johnson
County for 90 percent of the funding for educational expenditures in every other corner of the state,
while taxing the people outside Johnson at a much lower rate.
If such a discriminatory situation were constructed by the wise majority in Topeka, how would the
residents of Johnson County fight back? Not through the courts that were neutered by the Topekans.
Furthermore, in our effectively one-party state it is hard to imagine a more difficult road for the
electorate to hoe in throwing out a group of legislators who can hide in the cloud of partisan politics
diffused by a constellation of interests.
The Topeka faction supporting a constitutional amendment to create an extra-legal space in the

Kansas Constitution should cut to the chase and eliminate Article 6, Section 6(b), which states the
following: "The legislature shall make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the
state. No tuition shall be charged for attendance at any public school to pupils required by law to
attend such school, except such fees or supplemental charges as may be authorized by law."
Elimination of this language would remove the responsibility of funding public education from the
hands of state government.
This is after all what I think a significant number of the legislators in Topeka would like to do but don't
yet have enough guts to nakedly state - eliminate public education.
John Segale is a member of the Johnson County Commission. He lives in Shawnee.