BUDGET UPDATE Friday, 5:00 pm So far, ALL SENATE REPUBLICANS ARE HOLDING FIRM. The budget bill (SB 77) is two votes short of passage. The Democrats are holding the roll open indefinitely in hopes of pressuring passage and have “locked down” the Senate, meaning that it may be in session all night – Democrats seem to have a penchant for that. PLEASE KEEP THE PHONE CALLS AND E-MAILS COMING TO SENATE REPUBLICANS THEIR OFFICES SHOULD BE OPEN AS LONG AS THE BUDGET BILL IS PENDING. YOU’RE MAKING A DIFFERENCE AND NOW IS THE TIME TO POUR IT ON. Below is the speech I just gave on the Senate Floor Mr. President: A year ago, this legislature adopted a budget that ran up the biggest general fund deficit in California’s history. The architects of this budget admit to adding another half billion dollars to the cumulative shortfall, and expect that this looks good in comparison. There are two problems. First, by their own numbers, this budget sets in motion a deficit next year of between $5 ½ billion to $7 billion (depending on how you account for reserves). That means the five-year… Read More

The Federal Election Commission announced yesterday that it would revise its regulations to account for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Wisconsin Right to Life case to exempt genuine issue ads from regulation under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. The FEC’s move is intended to make its rules clearer "in time for the Presidential primaries and caucuses in early 2008."

An important aspect of all this is the regulation of speech, under the guise of campaign reform, that criticizes or lobbies politicians for their policy views during an election campaign, but falls short of express advocacy of the election or defeat of a candidate. In California, the FPPC maintains a broadrule that extends regulation of communications beyond those containing just explicit words of express advocacy. That rule was enjoined in a court challenge as applied to initiative campaigns, but it still exists with respect to candidate elections. The FPPC ought to consider revising its rule consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, and add an explicit rule protecting "genuine issue ads" from regulation.… Read More

Ok, so everyone will be talking about the budget today, and we will hear lots of comments about the budget, about bloat, about special interests, and the like. The good news–it has tax cuts in it. I hear that the Democrats have all the signatures they want on the term limits initiative and want to turn it in as soon as possible. They don’t want to turn them in while the budget impasse continues. Something about bad public relations or something. The bad news, it still has a $105 billion spending plan, and keeps the structural deficits. To put this in perspective, the first budget I voted on was a $40.9 billion general fund plan. The budget when Gray Davis took office was $57 billion general fund, and when Schwarzenegger took office it was $78 billion general fund. Interestingly enough, all of the Davis increases ($21 billion) took place in his first two years in office, and then the budget collapsed. Schwarzenegger has increased the budget by $27 billion in 4 years, and it continues to grow.

The truth is, this budget was lost in January when the Governor submitted the budget.

But now for the off topic subject.

Two weeks ago,… Read More

From the time I was in t-ball, my dad always used to tell me that I needed to use two hands when catching pop ups. Sure, 99 times out of 100 it’s no big deal, and the out is made. But then there’s that other one…

It’s with that in mind that I write about the last night’s budget votes.

Throughout the night, the Assembly leaders hustled to get a budget, some budget, any budget passed. Negotiations took place. Concessions were made. Entire sections of the budget were rewritten hastily in the middle of the night, being fueled by cold pizza and colder coffee.

But last night, unfortunately, it seems someone forgot to remind our leadership to use both hands.

As part of the grand deal that was cut, the Research and Development tax credit for businesses was to be expanded, to provide conformity with the federal tax code relating to R&D. As part of the package that was agreed to, those provisions would then sunset in 5 years.

However, that isn’t exactly what made it’s way into the final product.

Instead of those provisions sunsetting in 5 years, the budget as written sunsets the entire section of the tax code relating to… Read More

I’m in Washington, D.C. and just attended a briefing of American Conservative Union board members by national pollster Tony Fabrizio of Fabrizio, MacLaughlin, on his firm’s recent national in-depth survey of Republicans. This was a detailed and extensive study, involving 2,000 interviews in the polling sample, nationwide. It was not prepared for any candidate. The poll results are available on their site at: http://www.fabmac.com/releases.html.

Among the interesting findings of this survey, which tracked changing attitudes of Republicans, is the emergence of an identifiable new subgroup of Republican voters that Tony calls, "Dennis Miller Republicans." These types of Republicans have emerged in the last 10 years. They share a lot of the positions of "libertarian" Republicans, but they are not exactly libertarian. While Tony finds that libertarians in the Republican party (about 10% of them) remain essentially identifiable by their profound philosophical opposition to government authority, the Dennis Miller Republicans are ones who "just don’t like government,"… Read More

Night owls, the Assembly is going through the labor-intensive process of a ton of trailer bills to the main budget bill. The budget currently has 55 votes on the big board, one more than it needs to pass. But it is still "on call" which means that votes can change. This is done because the ‘deal’ will involve achieving 54 votes on all of these trailer bills, and you wouldn’t want to close the final budget vote until you pass the trailer bills concurrently. Once the trailers have all passed, and they lock int he final budget vote, we will bring you the intel on which GOPers voted for it. **Update 12:35am. A slight drama is playing out right now. Among the plethora of trailer bills is the health trailer bill, in which is funded, among many other things, an aweful lot of public funds for abortions. Like all trailer bills, it requires 54 votes. Right now, there are only 51 votes for it. … Read More

So in the wee hours, the DEMOCRAT budget passes, as does the controversial health trailer bill that contains the "poison pill" amongst other programs.

The budget, SB 77, required 54 votes (2/3) to pass the Assembly. One Democrat was absent which means seven GOP votes were needed for passage, and the following NINE Republicans voted for it: Adams, Aghazarian, Berryhill, Blakeslee, Emmerson, Horton, Keene, Niello, and Villines.

The Health Serves also required 54 votes, and it got 55. They were: Adams, Aghazarian, Berryhill, Blakeslee, Emmerson, Maze, Niello, and Villines went up on that.

Quick observations:

1) Due to the hard work of Mike Villines and his leadership team, this DEMOCRAT budget is better than it was before they insisted on some reforms. They should be recognized for some real impacts to take this from worse to bad. 2) Despite their best efforts, stepping back and looking at this DEMOCRAT budget, it is no where near what Republicans would have put forth if we had a majority. It is still a terrible fiscal plan for California. 3) This is demonstrated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Republican… Read More

Last night the California State Assembly passed a budget and sent it over to the Senate for their approval or rejection. The budget came out of the lower house with the support of all Democrats present, and slightly over the minimum number of Republican votes to get to the two-thirds required.

Let me start this commentary by reminding FR readers that like almost all of you, I am a far-away spectator to what goes on under the Capitol dome — I am in Southern California myself. Not being a denizen of the State Capitol, one tends to have a better perspective, I think, of the big picture. So from here, I can tell you that the passage of this budget out of the Assembly is nothing that should excite taxpayers, and certainly it is not good news for Republican Party leaders, donors and activists. The budget that was passed this morning was not support by over two-thirds of GOP legislators for a reason — it is a vastly inferior budget to one that would have been passed if there was a Republican majority in the… Read More