John Fund over at the Wall Street Journal had this interesting take-away from the recent California GOP confab:

Arnold Versus the Republicans

Allies of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger scored an important victory earlier this month by shutting down attempts by conservative delegates to the GOP State Convention in Sacramento to denounce his proposed $12 billion universal health care plan.

The governor avoided the embarrassment of having his own party label his plan a "tax hike" that Republicans should actively fight to defeat or overturn. But it took some awkward parliamentary footwork for the governor to avoid the rebuke and his narrow escape may only set the stage for bigger battles at the ballot box between the governor and the party he nominally heads.

The two resolutions opposing the Schwarzenegger plan to tax hospitals, doctors and employers in order to provide universal health care were supposed to be heard by a 15-member resolutions committee. But less than a majority of the committee showed up for the vote so it couldn’t meet. That meant the resolutions could not go to the convention floor and be approved by a simple majority vote. An attempt was made to override the rules and allow consideration of the anti-tax resolutions but the rule change failed to generate the required two-thirds vote of the 1,205 delegates attending.

Senator Tom McClintock, the leading GOP opponent of Arnold Care, says the failure to pass the resolutions should not be viewed as an endorsement of the governor’s plan. His aides say the resolutions would have passed easily if a simple majority vote had been allowed.

For now, Senator McClintock, who won 48% of the vote in an unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor last year, has set up a new group called Citizens for the California Republic, which he hopes will mobilize his 75,000 past campaign donors to support a new vehicle to influence public policy through the initiative process and grass-roots organizing. Mr. McClintock points out that in 2003, when then-Governor Gray Davis and the Democratic legislature passed a previous universal health care plan, voters repealed it the next year.

While I agree that it is too bad that there was not a quorum for the Resulutions Committee, I think that one major reason that delegates did not pass resulutions attacking the Governor’s leftward shift in his public policy agenda was a desire to not ‘pop the Gov on the nose’ as he has committed to raising the funds to pay off the State GOP’s sizable debt (money which was spent to re-elect the Gov).  Oh, and the link to Tom McClintock’s new foundation is here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.