HENDERSON ON NEVADA SC

At NRO, Rick Henderson gives his take on the Nevada Supreme Court's July 10 decision to allow the legislature to set aside supermajority requirements for tax increases in the interest of securing adequate education funding, which the Court understood to be required by the state constitution.

Henderson is a Nevadan who pays attention to Nevada politics, so his anaylsis is worth a look. And he is clear on the basic politics of the issue in Nevada: "populist free-market reforms" on the one hand, and what he calls "welfare-state activists" on the other -- although in this instance, the Nevada Supreme Court portrayed itself as defending constitutional rights to free, public education, also written into the state constitution; critics of the ruling tend to ignore that part and also the increased attention that state courts are giving to state constitutional requirements to fund education, partly because such rulings pose a problem for those who wish to gut public education for one reason or another. Whatever you think of the Nevada Supreme Court's decision, critics of public education have to come up with an account of the meaning of state constitutional provisions -- and it's hard for me to imagine that they will be able to employ standard approaches of "original intent" to support their position.