What does the future hold for New Hampshire if the Supreme Court’s Claremont rulings are not overturned by a constitutional amendment? The candidates for governor know.

Under the Claremont regime, New Hampshire must define an “adequate” education and fully fund it at the state level. The court has decreed that the state has to provide the same base amount of education funding to every community. Those orders have enormous financial and educational consequences.

Educationally, the orders mean that the state is operationally prohibited from targeting education aid to the communities that need it the most. Because the state cannot afford to dole out the same base aid to every community and then give enough to poor communities to help them catch up to the richer ones, the state under Claremont will always have a wide gap between its poorest and richest school systems.

Financially, the state cannot afford to give the same aid to every school district indefinitely unless major new sources of revenue are found. Without a constitutional amendment, we are heading for a broad-based tax.

The Claremont debate really is about three things: Legislative authority to decide education policy, low taxes, and targeting aid. As we saw in last week’s House vote on CACR 12, the education funding constitutional amendment, the New Hampshire Democratic Party is strongly opposed to all three.

State Democrats abhor the idea that the people’s elected representatives will be in charge of state education funding and policy. They prefer to keep the courts in charge. They want higher taxes, especially a broad-based tax, so they are fine with Claremont pushing us there, as they won’t have to take as much heat for it when it inevitably happens. And they are so ideologically committed to the state having all power over public education that they cannot abide targeted aid, which would give local governments more control over school spending.

Almost alone within his party, Gov. John Lynch favored a constitutional amendment overturning Claremont because he saw the harm the rulings would do eventually. All three Democratic candidates to succeed Lynch — Maggie Hassan, Jackie Cilley and Bill Kennedy — favor the Claremont regime. Should any of them win, New Hampshire would take one more step toward a broad-based tax and permanent judicial oversight of public education, which now must be considered a de facto part of the Democratic Party platform.