Posted on 05/11/2008 2:21:24 PM PDT by SmithL
Anyone who enjoys cagey politicking should doff his or her cap to California's Republican legislators.
That's because the Reeps have been very impressive lately in maneuvering their Democratic counterparts into a corner in this year's dance over the state budget.
As we all know, Republicans make up just 39.1 percent of the Legislature, and have no illusions of increasing that percentage anytime soon. Moreover, they've been a minority for more than a decade.
Traditionally, the Reeps have been content to just say no when it comes to the budget. As one of the very few substantive legislative processes in which they matter (because of the state Constitution's two-thirds-vote- for-passage requirement), I suspect some of them actually look forward to budget time.
They can rise to their feet, sputter pious conservative maxims about "a penny saved is a penny earned" and "it's not a revenue problem, it's a spending problem," and then vote no.
Last year, Senate Republicans held out for 52 days beyond the July 1 start of the fiscal year, marking the 16th time in the past 20 years the budget has been late. In return for their holdout, they got an additional $700 million in cuts by the governor that they had sought, enmity from editorial writers and Democrats, and a propagation of the belief that the only positive thing about Republican lawmakers is negative.
But this year, the Reeps have taken a different, much more proactive tack.
Thrice in the past few weeks, they've come out with what they say are budget-balancing proposals that don't involve raising taxes.
In late April, they rolled out a plan to restore about half the $4.8 billion reduction for K-12 education programs that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed in January.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
the Reeps proposed a series of government "reforms," which included allowing public agencies to sidestep the use of unionized labor if they could get the services cheaper from other sources,Like the unions would ever allow the Democrats to approve that.
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