Here's a new one. The Kansas Legislature has passed out of a House committee a proposed amendment to the state constitution barring the Kansas courts from issuing remedial orders to increase school spending. The local paper's story is here. This action is purportedly in response to the 2005 Montoy v. State ruling that held the state's school finance system unconstitutional and ordered increases in expenditures.
I am often skeptical that school finance remedial orders will be effective, mostly because I believe that, at a certain point, most legislatures will simply choose not to comply (or enough legislators will simply not vote to increase funding), and no state grants its Supreme Court the power to hold individual legislators in contempt for failing to vote a particular way. But I have to confess that I never expected a state legislature to go on the offensive like this.
Essentially, if passed and ratified, this provision would take the relatively prudential determination of whether to order a coercive judicial remedy after identifying a constitutional violation, and decide it for the court. I have argued in the past that courts which hold a state constitution to be violated, but choose not to issue remedial orders, engage in an illegitimate form of "remedial abstention," which leaves plaintiffs whose rights have ostensibly been violated with no redress. In an upcoming paper, I argue that this has the effect of devaluing any "education rights" that the plaintiffs possess. The Kansas provision, if passed and ratified, makes that outcome much more likely.