The Washington state Supreme Court has ordered the state to pay sanctions to the tune of $100,000 per day for lack of progress toward meeting the full requirements of public education funding found in the court’s 2012 McCleary decision. The court also incentivized Jay Inslee to call another legislative special session in order to address what the court views as funding shortcomings.
The justices would like to place the fine money in a special account “for the benefit of basic education.” The money would be returned to the state if Inslee orders a special session and lawmakers manage to appease the court by addressing the issues it raises.
Inslee released a written statement in which he did not indicate whether or not he would call a special session. He did say he would speak with State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and (most assuredly Democrat) legislators to analyze the order.
The far left was quick to attack Republicans, blaming them for the court’s decision. In what felt like mere moments after the decision, ultra-liberal mouthpiece Fuse Washington (funded by the far-left millionaires and billionaires at the Washington Progress Alliance) created a page on its website for the sole purpose of casting blame on State Senator Andy Hill. Fuse asks, “How much has Andy Hill cost us?” The page includes a running total and the following statement,
“Budget Chair Andy Hill is costing the state $100,000 in fines each day because his budget does not adequately fund education, the paramount duty of the state.”
Fuse’s knee-jerk blaming of Sen. Hill and Republicans for the court’s decision is, simply put, off base. That’s because our public schools only started seeing significant new money when the GOP-led Majority Caucus Coalition took over the Senate in 2013. And, frankly, the amount of money designated for meeting the McCleary decision was just about the only issue Republicans and Democrats agreed on at the start of budget negotiations, with both legislative bodies proposing $1-billion+ increases. In the end, lawmakers agreed on a $1.3 billion increase.
Before flinging its wild accusations, Fuse also forgets to take into account how our state got into the present education funding mess in the first place. The real irony – and not one Fuse is allowed to admit, if it wants to keep getting its funding from rich liberals – is that Democrats have been chronically underfunding public education for a generation.
The facts are that Democrats have controlled at least one house of the Legislature in 28 of the last 30 years – and had complete control of the Legislature in 14 of those years. A Democrat governor has signed every state budget since 1985. Under these heavily Democrat-controlled budgets, the ratio of new education spending versus other new government spending was 1:2 (in other words, the Democrats’ priority was two dollars for bigger general government for every new dollar of education funding).
If Fuse would like to respond to the court’s decision by being honest in the blame game, the far left group would do better to point the finger at the Democrats it fiercely supports.
