Senator Bruno caused quite a stir in Albany the other day when he suggested that the state Supreme Court judge who created the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit mess — Leland DeGrasse of Manhattan — should also be the one to clean it up. The assumption at the state Capitol was that Mr. Bruno, at the end of a tense and fruitless negotiating session, had let his exasperation get the better of him. How else to explain an upstate Republican legislator voluntarily ceding authority to an activist Democratic judge from New York City?

We wonder, however, if there isn’t method to Mr. Bruno’s madness. To paraphrase Churchill, letting the courts take control of the city schools budget might be the worst possible solution to the CFE case — except for all the others. The CFE lawsuit contended that the many shortcomings of the nation’s largest public school system owe entirely to a lack of money. Judge DeGrasse not only swallowed this canard, but declared, implausibly, that a school system that already op erates on spending of more than $11,000 a pupil — compared to a national average of $8,000 — has a constitutional right to still more of the taxpayers’ money.

Mr. Pataki, after resisting the lawsuit in court, now insists on portraying its disastrous outcome as a “historic opportunity” to reform the public education system — though at this late date he has yet to enunciate any reforms we would consider even remotely historic. And the speaker, Sheldon Silver, claims that pumping more cash into bloated, mismanaged, government-run schools is “about the children.” Mr. Bruno seems to recognize that it is futile for him to debate the issue with Mr. Silver when the only opinion that seems to matter is that of Mr. DeGrasse. To follow his modest proposal, therefore, would be to throw the situation into sharp relief. The spectacle could galvanize public opinion against judge-made education policy and, perhaps, lead to a constitutional amendment that would, once and for all, put CFE to rest.