Next Wednesday will be a busy one for the State Senate Rules Committee as they hold hearings, and votes, on a slew of pieces of proposed legislation.  State Senator Jeff Denham will occupy a good portion of the committee’s time as he has introduced a great many of those bills himself.  But this morning I wanted to highlight three of them – two great ideas, and one not-so-great idea.

First – the great ones – SCR 68 and SCR 69 are described thusly by the Senate Republican Caucus:

These two proposals are a great idea.  Right now, the budget process in the legislature is, for lack of a better description, a farce.  There is no give and take or working out of anything in budget subcommittees or in the budget committee itself, because Democrats have set up rules that allow items to pass out of these committees on a majority vote.  The kicker, of course, is that the budget itself, must pass off of the floor both the Senate and the Assembly with a two-thirds vote.  By creating a process where the two-thirds standard must be met in committee, in ensures that there is actually a reasonable chance at ultimate passage.  The current process simply means that Democrats pass a budget from the conference committee that reflect only their ideology and priorities. 

The proposal by Denham that I think is not a good idea is SCA 16, which is described as follows:

The argument against this measure is pretty straight forward, from the perspective of those who want to hold the line against growth in state government spending…  and to put it very simply, a late budget is INFINITELY better than a budget that increases state spending or increases the financial burden on California taxpayers with new taxes or fees.  If this measure would pass, it would put pressure on Republican legislators who perhaps are not wealthy to compromise on a budget for the wrong reasons – to feed their families and pay their mortgages.  I’m sure that Senator Denham actually introduced this bill to try and force Democrats to come to the table, but my perspective is that, on balance, this is a very bad idea..

Denham gets a lot of credit for pushing hard.  He has some other proposals in the hopper as well including cutting the Governor’s pay if he doesn’t submit a balanced budget on time, and locking the legislators into session 24/7 if the budget is not passed on time…  Of course, the very likely outcome on Wednesday is that Senate Democrats, who love the status quo, will kill all of Denham’s proposals…

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.