It’s June 15, the State Has a Budget and So What?
If 12 months ago you had told California legislators that by today they’d have a state budget passed and signed by the governor, it would have been deafening cheers and high fives all around.
After all, while the state Constitution calls for a balanced budget to be approved by the Legislature and sent to the governor by June 15, it hasn’t happened since 1986. Until this year.
But the celebrations are on hold as legislators and the governor wrangle over that 2009-10 budget in a financial fracas that threatens to be every bit as ugly as the battles that have filled Sacramento summers in years past.
For the tealeaf readers in the capital, the omens aren’t good for a quick solution to the $24.3 billion shortfall already forecast for the coming year.
Reaching Back in Time for a Government Reform Plan
With all the talk of government reform and the possibility of a constitutional convention, Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Arleta) decided there is a better way to seek a restructuring plan. Revive the recommendations of the Constitutional Revision Commission of 1996.
The commission of 23 members met for two years during the last deep fiscal crisis to hit the state. At the time, many believed that the state’s fiscal problems could best be solved by revising the way government works. Sound familiar? Instead of calling a constitutional convention, Governor Pete Wilson and legislative leaders created a commission to suggest revisions to the state’s constitution. Bill Hauck, now the president of the California Business Roundtable, chaired the commission.
Fuentes wants to take the commission’s recommendations off the shelf and give them a good hearing. He believes the recommendations could lead to important constitutional changes and improve governance in the state without resorting to a constitutional convention. He is urging the Assembly Democratic Caucus to get behind the commission’s recommendations.
What Will Historians Write?
We know only one thing for certain about history – that historians will write it. What they will write about periods of turbulence in American and World history (some would say it is the same subject over the last century), that’s another matter entirely. Nobody knows how historians will view 2008-2009 and the great economic upheaval, which is not done upheaving yet, not by a longshot.
I grew up staring at a bookshelf filled all the way across with my Uncle Teddy’s books, each personally autographed to me, starting back before I could read, but, they were one of the first things where I worked out the letters to read words that I could pronounce. Teddy did that for my Dad and his other brother and sister, and for me and all the other nieces and nephews.
(Theodore H. White, wrote The Making of the President series, tracking nearly 20 years of American Presidential campaigns, after beginning his career as the Time/Life correspondent in World War II-torn China, which produced his early landmark book: Thunder Out of China)
What would Teddy White, whom many say invented modern political journalism, say about what we have been living through these past 17 months?