<p>Traditionally, the partisan fires have burned more intensely in the Assembly than in the Senate, so budget squabbles have often been resolved in the upper house first. But two years ago, when the latest budget crisis first began to emerge, the pattern was broken. Rather than forge a bipartisan deal with Republican senators, the Senate's Democratic leadership and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis adopted a pickoff strategy. With 26 Democrats in the Senate, they needed just one Republican to break ranks for a two-thirds margin. That one was Maurice Johannessen, a Redding businessman who, after leaving the Senate, was named by Davis as the state's veterans affairs secretary.</p>