With all due deference to FR friend Bill Leonard who makes a convincing case about the overall effectiveness of furloughs, the Governor and his legal team are on a roll. Today, Judge Marlette issued a tentative ruling in their favor on the case that the Governor launched to force Chiang to implement furloughs to constitutional officers. This is just off the heels of the tentative ruling in the Governor’s favor on the minimum wage case that I wrote about two weeks ago. Chiang, following union orders, first refused to implement the Governor’s executive order to furlough state employees at all and was smacked down by Judge Marlette. He then refused to furlough constitutional officers offices at their request and the Governor promised to take legal action to force him to comply.
The Governor is poised to get another important victory for taxpayers. The Judge’s tentative ruling sided with the Governor’s authority to furlough state employees that work for “elected civil executive officers”, a.k.a. constitutional officers. If he sticks with this opinion in his final ruling, which is likely, future Governors will be able to implement furloughs to state employees without being disobeyed by elected officials who believe their employees are outside the Governor’s jurisdiction. That means a fiscally responsible Governor will have another way to cut costs and avoid raising taxes. It was truly shameful that the constitutional officers even refused to abide by the Governor’s reasonable furlough order in the first place. It makes each of them look out of touch with the fiscal situation and I’m sure taxpayers didn’t buy that they were making the savings elsewhere.
As I’ve previously said, these issues are going to come back to haunt Chiang when he runs for a statewide office. Not only was he trying to avoid making cuts in state government during a time when taxes are being raised to solve a large deficit, but he was also behaving illegally and had to be forced by the Governor to comply. Let’s hope he thinks twice before he tries to keep this losing streak going.
It’s important for my psyche to focus on some of these appropriate battles that the Governor is waging – especially against the unions. While I wrote this, for a few minutes, I was able to not think about the massive tax increase that he just signed into law.