Make no mistake, in its showdown with the Legislature over school funding, it was the Washington State Supreme Court that blinked first.

Oh, it won’t be spun that way. The court announced on Thursday morning it had found the state in contempt for not moving fast enough about pumping billions more into K-12 education as ordered in the McCleary ruling. And it created another deadline—the end of 2015—by which the Legislature had better gets its act together.

But the court also announced the contempt decree would carry no immediate sanctions.

Presumably because it couldn’t.

Reasonable people can disagree over whether the state is, in fact, failing to live up to its “paramount duty” under the state constitution to adequately fund basic education, but there’s no realistic or legal way the court can compel the Legislature to do otherwise because one branch of the government can’t realistically sanction another.

How would that even work, anyway? Would the court order the Capitol building surrounded by National Guard troops? Would every member of the Legislature be subject to fines and arrest if the body fails to approve a court-approved education budget, or would we just penalize the members who dared vote their conscience rather than accept the dictates of the court?

It was seriously suggested during last week’s show-cause hearing, during which an assistant attorney general was required to explain why the state shouldn’t be found in contempt, that the court could order the Legislature into special session until a funding solution was approved.

Left unaddressed, of course, was the question of what would happen if the lawmakers failed—as they have for two years—to satisfy the court’s demands.

Would they be ordered back onto the floor at gunpoint if they tried to adjourn?

Justice Charles Johnson even asked why the court couldn’t issue a blanket order invalidating each of the hundreds of “tax exemptions” on Washington’s books to make up the difference. It had to be explained to him that, while the court has the power to invalidate laws individually if they violate the constitution, it can’t simply eliminate perfectly constitutional laws just because they stand in the way of the court’s pet cause.

To that end, the justices then mulled the idea of invalidating any state budget that doesn’t live up to their expectations—again, notwithstanding the hard fact that writing a budget is exclusively the function the Legislature, not the court.

None of which is to suggest the Legislature should be allowed to break promises or flout the law with impunity. But the justices—at the urging of the teachers’ union and the Democrat candidates they bankroll so generously—have been playing an audacious bluff hand since the McCleary ruling was handed down in the first place.

What happened on Thursday morning is their bluff was called but they’re trying to rake in the chips anyway.

And that’s likely to work out about as well as it does in any lively poker game.