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.
At some point, I guess Democrats will get a “cold shower of reality” when they finally get it – that there is NOT ONE Republican vote for raising taxes to deal with the state’s overspending-caused financial woes. That is to say there isn’t a vote to raise even ONE DOLLAR of new taxes, let alone the ludicrous and shameful numbers being thrown around by lame-duck State Senate President Don Perata and newly-minted Speaker Karen Bass.
Maybe there are computers with internet access in he conference committee chambers. If so, it’s not too late for Dutton and Niello to join The Tournament. It’s probably a more realistic use of time than the nauseating process of watching their Democrat counterparts budget billions upon billions of dollars in spending with money that just isn’t available to be spent…
Care to read comments, or make your own about today’s Daily Commentary?
Just click here to go to the FR Weblog, where this Commentary has its own blog post, and where you can read and make comments.