Paul Tractenberg Hates Democracy

Paul Tractenberg, the architect of the Abbott spending regime which has bankrupted the state, has this to say on Bob Braun's Ledger:

What else have we failed to do? We have not won the state over to this cause. The state has opposed our efforts in court and in other forums far more often than it has supported them. At the risk of making my comments seem politically partisan, I have to say that, in my experience, the executive branch reaction has been far different when the governor has been a Democrat than when he or she has been a Republican. The Democratic governors—Byrne, Hughes, Florio, McGreevey, Codey and Corzine—seem to have genuinely accepted the principle that poor, at-risk students need and deserve adequate educational funding although their implementation of the principle was often insufficient. By contrast, the Republican governors—Cahill, Kean, Whitman, DiFrancesco and Christie–seemed at most to pay lip service to the principle and to strongly resist allocating sufficient funding for “other people’s children.” That has been so although Cahill, Kean and Whitman were said to be moderate, even progressive, Republicans.

The result of the State’s inability or unwillingness to rise to the challenge has been almost 45 years of continuous litigation, with the State expending untold millions of dollars unsuccessfully defending a series of school funding laws found unconstitutional, as we lawyers say, either as “applied” or “facially.”

Oh, that pesky democracy! How dare New Jersey's governors and legislatures not bow to the moral intelligence and superior wisdom of the Education Law Center! How dare New Jersey's elected officials consider anything as trivial as taxes!