Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is waving his veto pen at the Legislature again, saying, in effect, “Pass the water package or the rest of the bills get it.”
Actually, water’s only part of it. A spokesman for Schwarzenegger said Tuesday that action has to be taken on “the major issues facing our state – water, prison, renewable portfolio standard, appointments – before we consider other issues.’’
Schwarzenegger asked legislators to pull back any bills nearing their signing deadline and warned that otherwise he would veto any of them that had to be acted on either Tuesday or today. That led Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic Senate leader, to quickly grab 43 bills back from the governor’s desk. They will be resubmitted this week, which will restart the signing clock for them.
It was a Republican, Assemblyman Paul Cook of Yucca Valley, who had the misfortune to be the governor’s object lesson. Schwarzenegger squashed his AB 264, an innocuous bill designating March 30 as “Wecome Home Vietnam Veterans Day” and made it clear this was just the beginning.
“Our state is facing significant challenges, including the need for comprehensive changes in our policies on water, energy and corrections and the need to take meaningful steps to stimulate the economy and rein in rising levels of unemployment,” the governor said in his veto message. “This bill does nothing to address any of these issues.”
If the Legislature fixes the big stuff, the governor added, he’ll be happy to take a look at the hundreds of other bills awaiting his signature.
Keep in mind that there are only three days left in the legislative session, so the governor obviously has big hopes for the remainder of the week.
This new ploy has a more than passing resemblance to Schwarzenegger’s stratagem last September, when he vetoed a record 35 percent of the 1,187 bills the Legislature sent him.
His argument was that budget problems were taking so much time he just wasn’t able to deal with everything. He managed to infuriate legislators by vetoing many of the bills with a rubberstamp statement that he was only signing the most important bills – and theirs wasn’t one of them.
The plan, then as now, was to light a fire under the legislators by threatening to toss their bills into a deep hole and kick dirt over them unless they got cracking on Schwarzenegger’s priorities.
The state’s budget problems haven’t gone away, so there’s a question as to how well last year’s plan worked. But if Schwarzenegger wanted to rile up the politicians, his newest threat is an instant winner. He’s got legislators accusing him of blackmail and daring him to start vetoing bills wholesale and take the political consequences.
That’s not a threat that’s going to scare the governor. The political world didn’t end when Schwarzenegger vetoed some 400 bills last year and the governor probably isn’t the only person in California who thinks the state will get along just fine without a Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day and plenty of the other less-than-world-shaking laws and regulations that get passed by the Legislature each year.
While the Legislature has plenty to do and not much time to do it, there’s surprisingly no real feeling of urgency. A planned meeting of the conference committee on water was canceled Tuesday and rescheduled for today. The language of all the bills – and a way to pay for the planned upgrades to the state’s water system — still hasn’t been made public, despite the Friday deadline for a floor vote.
Steinberg also delayed a vote on the Assembly’s version of the prison bill, hoping that the lower house will be able to come up with something more to his – and the governor’s – liking.
Add to that the controversial plan to boost the use of alternative energy in the state and Schwarzenegger’s call for some sort of economic stimulus and unemployment relief and it’s guaranteed to be a long week.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.