The state of Washington could be headed for a constitutional showdown between the Supreme Court and the Legislature, and pundits are taking sides.
The court declared recently that lawmakers must appear before them in September to explain a lack of progress toward adequately funding public K-12 education. This has led editorial writers across the state to say the justices have “some type of self-inflated view” and that they are “self-aggrandizing” and that their order was “menacing.”
The kindling for all this fire was the court’s 2012 decision in McCleary v. Washington. Justices ruled that the Legislature for years had not adhered to the state constitution, which mandates that public education is lawmakers’ paramount duty. Using the Legislature’s own numbers, the court declared that the state must come up with an additional $3 billion in funding by 2018, and then the justices retained the right to tell lawmakers whether or not they were making adequate progress.
This has led to complaints that the Supreme Court doesn’t understand the basic principle of the separation of powers, that budget issues are the purview of the Legislature. But the justices point to previous failures by lawmakers to live up to their duties.