It’s 6:55am and I’m sitting on the Senate floor.  We’ve been here all night long.  All night.  We’ve been locked in and there are sergeants at every exit making sure we can’t leave.  I slept in a chair for about an hour (and btw – Dennis Hollingsworth snores :/ )

Ah – democracy at work.  Normally, I’d make some clever remark about the Assembly here, but we passed all the foolishness I’ve ever seen the Assembly engage in in my 13 years in the legislature.  It’s all rather quite embarrassing

To update you —- we’ve done nothing.

Yesterday, the Senate took up the irresponsible budget the Assembly passed the night before and defeated it (actually, it’s still "on call", but short of passage).  No Republican supported it.

The budget before us is out of balance, based on gimmicks, ignores existing debts and future obligations.  We’ve been real clear all along we couldn’t support it and that we needed to cut spending now to save the state a catastrophic problem next year.

So, after the budget bill went down the Senate Pro Tem Don Perata locked us in.

Get this, in the press all over the state Senator Perata is quoted as saying he won’t negotiate the budget with us – that it is good as it’s going to get.  And he was true to his word – not much of anything happened.  Leadership talked some – no movement – talked some more – no movement…..

My fellow Senate Republicans and I can only take his words to mean he plans on "breaking us" by keeping prisoner ’till we crack.

We’re made of sturdier stuff  – – – – and I sense a revolt coming…… there are a lot of tired and cranky Senators (Republican and Democrat) milling about.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.