Remember back in February, about Valentine's Day, when the state needed to borrow some money from idle accounts to put into the state general fund or some 40,000 Kansas employees wouldn't be paid?

Remember legislative leaders wailing that their constituents were being held hostage by the governor, used as a club to force them to allow that internal borrowing that the governor wanted to do but the Legislature wasn't keen on?

It was a pretty interesting little showdown. And, by the way, the Legislature lost. There were some other things going on, but finally, the Legislature's top leaders went along with the borrowing because they were basically not prepared to go home for the weekend and face constituents who didn't get a paycheck on that mid-February Friday.

Well, legislators were mad; they realized that if there is one ultimate political lever that a governor can use to get what the governor wants, it is probably not paying lawmakers' constituents.

And ... that's all over now.

It was quiet, nobody paid much attention to it, but in the last hours of the 2009 Legislature, a bill got passed and eventually signed into law that will never allow state employees -- not just the "regular" folk who work for state agencies, but also members of the Kansas National Guard who are essentially the prom queens of the state payroll -- to be used as hostages by an administration to force lawmakers to approve internal borrowing.

The administration can put a halt on payments to school districts, to universities, hold back payments to contractors or maybe delay payments to others, but state employees are off the table.

Is this a big deal? Yes.

Almost immediately after July 1 passes and the state begins a new fiscal year with virtually no money in the bank, legislative leaders are going to be asked to approve more of that internal borrowing -- probably the same money that the state will repay on the last day of June to square up the books.

If the leaders OK the borrowing, well, that's just the course of business. But if they want to dissect just what that newly borrowed money will be used for, they won't have to worry that the paychecks of their state employee-constituents are on the line.

In a time of tight budgets, the balance of power shifts, just a little, toward the Legislature. We'll see where that takes lawmakers.

Syndicated by Hawver News Co. of Topeka, Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver's Capitol Report. To learn more about this statewide political news service, visit the Web site at www.hawvernews.com.