Boo-Hoo! Now The Courts Are To Blame, And Only Christie "Gets It."

Beautiful.

Today, a judge found that Gov. Chris Christie (R) violated Abbott v. Burke requirements when he slashed $820 million in state aid to schools last year, because the cuts were slanted too heavily towards poor districts:

Judge Peter Doyne, who was appointed as special master in the long-running Abbott vs. Burke school funding case, today issued an opinion that also found the reductions “fell more heavily upon our high risk districts and the children educated within those districts.”

“Despite spending levels that meet or exceed virtually every state in the country, and that saw a significant increase in spending levels from 2000 to 2008, our ‘at risk’ children are now moving further from proficiency,” he said.

“The difficulty in addressing New Jersey’s fiscal crisis and its constitutionally mandated obligation to educate our children requires an exquisite balance not easily attained,” Doyne wrote. “Something need be done to equitably address these competing imperatives. That answer, though, is beyond the purview of this report. For the limited question posed to the Master, it is clear the State has failed to carry its burden.“

Laymen's terms: You cannot simply slash spending on poor kids to balance your budget because you want to cut taxes for corporations and such. New Jersey has built into it's case law constitutional protection of funding for poor school districts, a group that usually find the budget cutting knife in other states, and would certainly with Christie. Christie responded with:

A Christie spokesman responded to the ruling this evening, blaming the court for exacerbating New Jersey's fiscal troubles, and sidestepping the central issue of unequally distributed cuts: "The court’s legal mandates on the legislative and executive branches of government have incontrovertibly contributed to our current fiscal crisis without uniformly improving education, particularly for the at-risk students the court claims to be helping with its rulings."

Essentially, Christie has been told "you can't do that." So now he's saying the judge is wrong, as is the precedent protecting poor districts. Why? Because Christie doesn't believe that in New Jersey, one of the nation's wealthiest states, extremely wealthy suburbanites should pay any of the bill for kids in Newark, Camden, Trenton, Jersey City, and even out in little old Phillipsburg. Don't get too excited or happy though. Think Christie will now go back on his corporate tax cuts, his opposition to a millionaire's tax, or cuts to corporate welfare in his state? Think again. Christie will not do these things, or anything else to balance his budget. He will blame public workers, President Obama, and the legislature. He'll end up either laying off thousands of public workers, or demanding enormous givebacks from them. With Christie, all the sacrifice is for "us," and not for "them."