Legislators’ phones will be ringing, jangling and buzzing in Sacramento the next couple of days as advocates for every group convinced it got the short end of the budget stick will be trying to make a last-minute deal.
Mayors and county supervisors will be screaming about losing billions in transportation and redevelopment money, environmentalists will be up in arms about new offshore drilling, state workers will be arguing about their furloughs and progressive Democrats will be upset about … well, just about every cut and revision in the adjusted budget.
Most of those complaints will get a sympathetic hearing – “I feel your pain” – and then a polite but unmistakable brush-off. After two months of watching California’s finances move onto life support, only a handful of legislators – that’s you Assemblyman Sandre Swanson – are likely to vote down what could be the only chance to staunch the bleeding.
Here’s a single question for anyone upset about the budget revise: What’s your alternative?
Don’t talk about taxes, because that ship has sailed. And ignoring the dismal numbers isn’t an option. So the only real answer is to take the money from someone else, who isn’t going to be any happier about being targeted.
There’s a reason negotiations are rarely settled quickly, even if the issues are simple. Until there’s been a thorough debate, both sides are convinced there’s a better deal to be had.
After two months of arguing, both Republicans and Democrats are convinced, however reluctantly, that this agreement is as good as either side is likely to get. That’s why most legislators will grimace at the stuff they don’t like and still vote “aye.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some rough spots that still have to be sanded down before Thursday’s planned budget vote. Republican already are complaining that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrats are trying to push through a plan calling for the early release of 27,000 prison inmates, something GOP leaders thought they killed.
“We had a clear understanding with the Democrats that NO corrections bill would be part of the budget,’’ Sam Blakeslee, the GOP Assembly leader told his caucus in an e-mail he helpfully headed “Budget Double-Cross?”
Blakeslee said he told Democratic legislative leaders that there “will be no Republican votes for any portion of the budget if they allow such a bill to be part of the package.’’
While Republicans apparently agreed to make $1.2 billion in cuts to the prison system, the details weren’t part of Monday night’s tentative agreement. But the final plan shouldn’t have been a surprise, since early release, with the accompanying savings, was part of the governor’s May budget revise.
By Tuesday evening, Matthew Cate, head of the prison system, was trying to put the best face on the deal, arguing that the governor wasn’t really calling for letting convicts out early, but only diverting some parole violators from prison, letting some low-level offenders spend their last year of custody under house arrest and releasing some criminal aliens, ah, early, but only so they could be deported.
The corrections package “would reduce the inmate population by 27,000 inmates over time, but those reductions would not be obtained through early release,’’ Cate said in a statement.
Maybe not, but plenty of Republicans are convinced the governor and the Democrats played a game of “bait and switch” on the prison cuts and aren’t happy at all.
If Blakeslee and the others make the prison cuts a deal breaker, look for the governor to pull the corrections bill out of the budget package and bring it up separately next month, when most, if not all of it, could be passed on a simple majority vote.
That won’t make Democrats happy, because a full-scale debate over early release, sentencing changes and other alterations to the prison and criminal justice system would make it that much easier for Republicans to vote “no” and wave the “soft on crime” card at Democrats during next year’s elections.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.