There can’t possibly be anything more frustrating than being one of the two Republicans who serve on the State Budget Conference Committee. The reason for this is that even though California voters long ago placed a two-thirds vote requirement to pass a state budget, this important clause intended to prevent a tyranny of the majority is ignored during the process where legislators actually go through the budget proposals. Or, to put it more simply, legislative Democrats in the Senate and in the Assembly use a majority-vote threshold in their Budget Subcommittee meetings, and in the case of the Budget Conference Committee, the Committee itself is stacked with a 2-1 advantage of Democrats to Republicans (which does not mirror the makeup of either house where Republicans have more than 1/3 of the seats). The result, predictably, is that Republicans are pretty much left out of the process at this stage, able to vocalize concerns about overspending, but lacking the votes on the Conference Committee to do anything about it.
Needless to say, this means that in terms of Democrat and Republican legislators engaging in good faith in a budget process – it’s really a farce. It is this charade that leads, year after year, to the entire state budget, in essence, being negotiated by the “Big 5” (the Governor and the Party Leaders in each house).
So, I guess State Senator Bob Dutton and Assemblyman Roger Niello, the respective conferees for their GOP caucuses on the Budget Conference Committee, can watch what will be an entertaining exercise… Senate Democrats want to raise taxes by $12,000,000,000.00 (12 billion big ones) and Assembly Democrats want to gouge Californians for a mere $6,400,000,000.00 (6.4 billion bucks). Oh how will they work this out? It would be comedic if there wasn’t such a very real disconnect here between the left-wing ideologues who control the legislature, and the reality of their tragic volume of overspending.
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