Rounds and Long Play Hardball with Schools

If you're going to file a lawsuit, you've got to be prepared to play by lawyers' rules, which means you've got to be ready to play mean. That's what the more than 70 South Dakota school districts suing the state for more funding are finding out, as Attorney General Larry Long has asked for and the Legislative Research Council's Executive Committee has approved audits of the litigating schools. AG Long is going fishing: he wants to look for any indication that schools participating in the lawsuit have slipped up and illegally used public funds to support their suit against the state.

Now the audit probably won't turn up much: school districts and their business managers generally have their financial poop in a group, at least legally speaking. Their budgets are tight enough it is, they can't afford some illegal misappropriation that could impact their budgets later. But mistakes do happen, and this audit is an easy way for the AG and the governor to say, "You want make life hard for us? We can make life hard for you."

Alas, AG Long has every right to conduct this audit. We expect him to ensure that all other laws are enforced; the proper spending of public funds deserves the same oversight. But the political motivation is clear. That's what happens when we step out of the legislative arena and into the judicial to solve our problems. In the legislature, there's at least a chance for collegial collaboration, public officials working together toward a common goal. Once we go to court, we switch to adversarial mode, and the gloves come off. Lawyers (including attorneys general) can get nasty in ways they wouldn't think of in normal discourse. In adversarial mode, the lawyers' primary obligation is no longer to the truth ("Does the legislature provide enough money to the public schools? Can we find other revenue sources?") but to their clients, and they fulfill that professional obligation by using all the tactics and tricks they can think of to advance their case.

Don't get me wrong: as a debate coach, I teach kids to use the adversarial system. I'm all about the dialectic process as a means for synthesizing ideas and arriving at a better grasp of truth. But the legal dialectic process is ugly, and it is clear that the Rounds administration intends to play hardball throughout. In the course of this lawsuit, we can't expect the state to put its constitutional obligation to educate first and go easy on the litigating schools. Let's hope the schools are ready to give as good as they get.