Like many voters who believe Hawaii’s keiki deserve a quality public education, I was shocked by the Hawaii Supreme Court’s pre-emptive strike against voter’s rights.

The court’s order to invalidate a proposed constitutional amendment already on the ballot was unprecedented. Previously, when questions were put to voters and challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court exercised restraint and allowed the will of the people to be heard.

Even in those rare instances when questions were eventually invalidated, the preceding debates and resulting vote counts had profound impacts on the issues as they properly moved forward.

During oral arguments, no references were made to a standard of review or established case law. In the absence of precedent authority, the court seemed to extrapolate hypotheticals from a landowner bias. Then the court determined that reasonable voters could not possibly grasp what “surcharge on investment real property” meant.

In one patronizing swoop, the justices quashed public debate and civic engagement on this issue, and denied our rights as voters.

Constitutions are considered “living documents” because the rights they enumerate expand and contract over time with the way their representative democracies interpret their broad language.

For instance, in 1870, the United States ratified the 15th Amendment of its Constitution to “prohibit the federal government and states from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Imagine if the U.S. Supreme Court at that time, made up of all white men, warned citizens that the adoption of this Amendment could one day lead to a black man being elected president of the United States.

Closer to home, let’s examine a more recent amendment. In 1972, Hawaii was the first state to incorporate the Equality of Rights on the basis of “sex” into its Constitution.

Imagine if the Hawaii Supreme Court back then, all straight men, invalidated the question because voters could not possibly understand how broadly the term “sex” could be interpreted; nor should voters trust the Legislature to enact laws that would not abridge the rights of men as they ensured equality for women.

What if that 1972 court asked, “Isn’t the term ‘sex’ so broad that it could open the door to same-sex marriage in Hawaii?”

Both examples above depict how broadly-worded constitutional amendments evolved in ways that would have offended certain jurists and voters at the time they were ratified.

In contrast, today’s court ensured that landowners would never be offended by this amendment.

Protected landowners include out-of-state investors who own one-third of privately held land in Hawaii. Whereas, the one-third of Hawaii voters who cannot afford to own land in Hawaii were denied this right to vote.

Further, many landowners who do vote in Hawaii see nothing wrong in taxing a personal “want” in order to pay for a collective “need” — like public education.

Hawaii currently funds public education through a regressive general excise tax. Additionally, the working poor, not the wealthy, contribute the greatest proportion of their household income to provide for government services everyone uses.

Until Hawaii landowners join the rest of the nation in helping to fund public schools, it remains the responsibility of the Legislature to find alternative sources to fully-fund a quality education.

Lawmakers need to recapture Donald Trump’s tax giveaways for the wealthy. Corporations must pay their fair share of taxes — at least pay as much as they do in Republican-controlled states.

And citizens must continue to build coalitions, coalesce power and persistently reclaim democracy that serves the people.

Kim Coco Iwamoto is a lawyer and community activist.