For more than 50 years, non-public schools have been able to access money from their local school districts for transportation, learning materials and perhaps a counselor or a nurse. Money in the state budget is not sent to the non-public school but, rather, again, to the district and then dispersed. Nobody from the state shows up at Our Holy Mother of the Perpetual Deficit with a large canvas bag of cash.

Gov. Tim Walz wants to end that practice of modest sharing, the first governor to attempt to do so. He claims to be looking for ways to put a dent in the pending $6 billion budget deficit. Being the sharp numbers guy that he is, that $109 million for non-public education must have really jumped out at him, even when the funding for public education is routinely about half the entire state budget.

The governor also doesn’t have his facts straight. On the day when parents, teachers and students gathered in the Capitol Rotunda to demonstrate on behalf of preserving the payments, the governor said that he didn’t think it was fair to the taxpayers “to pay for for-profit schools.”

The non-public schools are not for-profit. On the contrary, they run on thin margins. It’s usually the school’s affiliated parishioners, in the case of a Catholic school, who get hit up when the school’s furnace conks out. The teachers and administrators don’t work with the safety net of the always-running state spigot. And you’ll have to tell me the last time you read a headline that said Our Holy Mother of the Perpetual Deficit falls $6 billion short of budget and needs more state money. You can’t tell me. It doesn’t happen.

Personally, I don’t think it’s fair to be governed by a guy so disingenuous, duplicitous and incompetent as Walz. But the voters, in a nod to the mystery of the cluttered human mind, voted for him, twice. That $6 billion budget deficit is the direct result of Walz and his trifecta of drunken sailors blowing the $18 billion surplus.

Fraud doesn’t seem to have gained any purchase with Walz supporters, either, but more than $600 million in fraud has leaked out of the state Capitol since Walz took office. A hotline established by a new legislative committee charged with stopping fraud has already, in a month’s time, received more than 600 calls.

Republicans in the Legislature vow to not let Walz strip the non-public school funding. Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, the GOP House floor leader, said, “House Republicans will not agree to an education bill that cuts non-public aid. We will not agree to an education bill that cuts this critical funding and leaves our next generation behind.”

Niska was talking about the 70,000 kids in Minnesota who attend non-public schools. There is no way of knowing how many of those kids would have to change schools if they face a tuition increase. Many parents, who, of course, also pay for public education, make significant sacrifices to send their children to private schools for a variety of reasons, none of which dare be questioned by Walz, who seems to harbor an ideological predisposition to believe in only a government school.

For example, Walz was quoted the other day as saying, “if you want to have a school that teaches your curriculum and things you do, you have every right to do that. I don’t think the taxpayers should be the ones who support you in that.”

You could almost hear a snarl of contempt for schools that might teach, oh horrors, faith. No other governor, remember, has tried to pull off this pathetic budget stunt. No other governor would purposely alienate the families of 70,000 kids.

And it is pathetic, a pathetically obvious stunt, which makes you wonder who he is pandering to.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.