Most arguments against Amendment 3 are fiscal. They describe a shell game, a liquidation, a cliff. Those arguments are sufficient. This paper adds a distinct argument: that Amendment 3 represents an improper use of the Louisiana Constitution itself. The Constitution is not an ordinary statute. It is a framework for government, meant to establish the rules and protections within which the ordinary policy process operates. Amending the Constitution to carry out a transaction that ordinary statutes could not execute — specifically, liquidating funds whose constitutional protection was the whole point of their creation — is an act that undermines the stability and purpose of constitutional law itself. That is a legal argument, addressed to lawyers, legislators, and judges. It is also a civic argument, addressed to every Louisiana voter who cares whether the state's Constitution is treated as a serious document or as a running policy manual subject to legislative convenience.
Article VIII of the Louisiana Constitution of 1974 establishes the state's basic framework for public education. Section 1 declares that "the legislature shall provide for the education of the people of the state." Section 13 requires the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), in coordination with the Legislature, to "annually develop and adopt a formula which shall be used to determine the cost of a minimum foundation program of education in all public elementary and secondary schools." The Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) is the primary mechanism by which the Louisiana Constitution commits the state to funding public education.
Article VIII's language is mandatory but permissive as to mechanism. The Legislature is required to fund public education adequately, but the Constitution does not specify how. In the decades following the 1974 ratification, Louisiana supplemented the basic MFP architecture with a series of dedicated trust funds — the LEQTF in 1986, the EEF in 1999, the Quality Education Support Fund in the early 2000s — each of which was placed in the Constitution in addition to the basic MFP obligation. The trust funds were designed to provide supplemental, targeted, and protected funding for specific education purposes that the annual appropriations process was judged too volatile to sustain.
The trust funds therefore occupy a specific legal and structural role. They are not the whole of Louisiana's education-funding commitment, nor are they a substitute for the MFP. They are the "durable layer" — the set of obligations that voters, through prior constitutional amendment, decided should be protected from ordinary political risk.
In American state constitutional law, the "adequacy doctrine" is a line of cases holding that state constitutions impose a judicially enforceable obligation on state legislatures to fund public education at a level sufficient to provide students with a meaningful educational opportunity. The leading cases are Rose v. Council for Better Education, 790 S.W.2d 186 (Ky. 1989) (Kentucky), Abbott v. Burke, 100 N.J. 269 (1985) and subsequent decisions (New Jersey), Claremont School District v. Governor, 142 N.H. 462 (1997) (New Hampshire), and a number of parallel decisions in other states. The Louisiana Supreme Court has not definitively adopted the full adequacy doctrine, but Louisiana's Article VIII language is closer to the adequacy-jurisdictions' language than to the states that have rejected the doctrine.
The adequacy doctrine is relevant to Amendment 3 in two respects. First, the trust funds Amendment 3 liquidates currently contribute to the meaningful-educational-opportunity baseline in a measurable way: early-childhood access, academic-improvement grants, endowed professorships that attract faculty to Louisiana universities. Removing that funding, without a demonstrated recurring replacement, raises adequacy questions under Article VIII. Second, the amendment's own Fiscal Note — which concedes that expenditures will increase while revenues decrease, and that the net impact cannot be quantified — provides a factual record that a future adequacy challenger could cite for the proposition that the Legislature, by its own admission, placed Louisiana's education-funding commitment on an actuarially uncertain foundation.
This is not a prediction that Amendment 3 will produce successful litigation. It is a statement that it creates the preconditions for such litigation, and that the Legislature's choice to liquidate constitutionally protected education endowments for a non-recurring purpose is exactly the kind of legislative action that adequacy plaintiffs in other states have successfully challenged.
The doctrine of constitutional prudence is not a legal doctrine in the formal sense — it is not cited in briefs or applied in holdings. It is a tradition in American constitutional governance, articulated in various forms by judges, scholars, and legislators, holding that a state constitution should be amended only for purposes that cannot be accomplished by ordinary legislation, and only after sustained deliberation over the long-run consequences of the amendment. The doctrine is traceable, in its clearest recent articulation, to former Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Pascal Calogero, who in several late-career addresses and articles argued that Louisiana's habit of constitutionalizing policy was corroding the Constitution's authority.
The doctrine has three practical tests, each of which Amendment 3 fails:
A constitutional amendment that repeals a prior constitutional protection — so that a specific legislative transaction can be completed — establishes a precedent. The precedent, in plain terms, is: whenever a current majority of the Louisiana Legislature and a current majority of Louisiana voters agree that a constitutionally protected fund can be better used for a different purpose, the fund can be liquidated. This is not a hypothetical precedent; it is the operative logic of Amendment 3.
If that precedent is established, the other constitutional protections in Louisiana's fund architecture become subject to the same analysis. The Revenue Stabilization Trust Fund, the Budget Stabilization Fund, the Mineral Revenue Audit and Settlement Fund, the Disability Affairs Trust Fund, and a dozen other dedicated funds are all vulnerable to the same logic: if a future Legislature identifies a purpose it prefers, it can propose an amendment to liquidate. Each proposal will have its own sympathetic constituency (pay raises for first responders; rainy-day funds for disasters; matching dollars for federal programs). The protections erode one amendment at a time.
The question Louisiana voters should ask themselves before voting on Amendment 3 is not only "do I support this particular transaction?" It is "do I want my state's Constitution to be the kind of document that can be amended to liquidate protections I or a prior generation approved?"
The funds Amendment 3 liquidates are, in economic terms, a form of intergenerational transfer. The 1986 OCS settlement and the 1999 tobacco settlement were, each in their own way, compensation for harms inflicted on prior Louisiana generations. The constitutional structure placed those compensatory payments in permanent endowments, ensuring that the benefit would flow to future generations of Louisiana students in perpetuity. Amendment 3 captures those benefits for the current generation — specifically, for the current Louisiana teacher workforce, with some residual benefit for current school districts — and extinguishes them for future generations.
This is not an argument that current teachers do not deserve a raise. It is an argument that the funding mechanism should not require a transfer from future Louisiana students to current Louisiana teachers. Intergenerational transfers are sometimes justifiable, particularly in emergencies. Louisiana's teacher pay gap is not an emergency in that sense; it is a structural problem that has persisted for decades and will persist after Amendment 3 regardless of outcome. Solving it by cashing out a permanent endowment is a choice, not a necessity.
Beyond adequacy and prudence, there is a narrower legal argument that applies specifically to the LEQTF. Article VII, Section 10.1 provides that the LEQTF's principal shall be "held as part of a permanent trust fund." The word "permanent" is not decorative. It reflects the 1986 Legislature's intent, ratified by voters, that the fund exist in perpetuity. A constitutional amendment can lawfully repeal Section 10.1. But it cannot rewrite the history of the 1986 amendment's ratification, nor can it negate the reliance interest that Louisiana's higher-education institutions have developed over nearly four decades of LEQTF distributions.
A university that has hired an endowed professor in reliance on LEQTF distributions, a graduate student admitted under an 8(g) stipend commitment, a research program funded through LEQTF allocations — each has a legitimate reliance interest that the 1986 "permanent" language was intended to protect. Amendment 3 does not formally impair any of these interests in a way that would trigger contract-clause protection, but it does erode the practical promise that the 1986 amendment made. Future voters considering other dedicated funds will weigh that erosion.
Amendment 3 is not merely bad fiscal policy. It is a misuse of Louisiana's Constitution. It repurposes the Constitution from its role as a framework of durable protections to serve as the vehicle for a single transaction that could not be completed under the existing framework. That is the kind of use that, over time, corrodes the Constitution's authority and stability. Louisiana has accumulated that corrosion in layers over decades — the state's Constitution is one of the longest and most frequently amended in the country, and the density of policy material in it is widely acknowledged as a governance problem. Amendment 3 adds to the layer.
Vote NO on Amendment 3 not only because the fiscal argument fails, but because the constitutional argument fails as well. A real teacher pay raise belongs in statute and in the MFP formula, funded by recurring revenue, achievable through ordinary politics. It does not belong in the Constitution in the form of a trust-fund liquidation. Defeat this amendment and the next one will be better.