Free Republic

Signaling that the "post-partisanship" called for by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be difficult to achieve, the governor's fellow Republicans in the state Senate on Thursday rejected one of his appointees to the State Board of Education. The Senate voted 25-11 on the confirmation of teachers' union activist Joe Nuñez, but with minority Republicans opposed, fell two votes short of the required two-thirds majority. Schwarzenegger reappointed Nuñez, a Democrat and official with the California Teachers Association, to the board in March, despite the fact that Nunez had helped lead a campaign against Schwarzenegger's ballot measures in the 2005 special election.

For two years, the California Teachers Association has beat up on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with relentless ferocity. It made sense: The CTA is used to treating state revenues as if they were an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the governor – at least in his old fiscal-conservative iteration – was eager to take the union on. Last November, unfortunately, the CTA won the power struggle. All four reform initiatives Schwarzenegger touted were rejected after a campaign in which the CTA-run Alliance for a Better California ran loads of demagogic ads describing the governor as a threat to truth, justice and the American...