Quick quiz: What two things does John Chiang have in common
with Alan Cranston, Houston Flournoy, Gray Davis and Steve Westly?
Well, like the others, he’s state controller and, as his
decision Tuesday to cut off pay to the Legislature showed, Chiang also doesn’t
plan to end his political career as California’s bookkeeper-in-chief.
Right or wrong – and you’ll find people on both sides –
Chiang’s decision to jump into the middle of the state’s annual budget brawl
was as much a political choice as an economic one.
You won’t hear that from Chiang, of course.
"My job is not to substitute my policy judgment for that of
the Legislature and the Governor, rather it is to be the honest broker of the
numbers," Chiang said
in announcing that the budget Gov. Brown vetoed last week wasn’t balanced, so
lawmakers won’t get paid.
I’m guessing that "honest broker" idea didn’t go down nearly
as well last year when Chiang was refusing to follow Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s order to cut the pay of 200,000 state workers – unionized
state workers — or in 2008 when he said he’d like to make the pay cuts the
governor ordered, but his computers wouldn’t let him.
As anyone who’s spent time watching California’s budget
process over the past few years knows, numbers can mean whatever a governor, a
legislator or even a controller wants them to mean, so the question of who is
an honest broker depends on where you’re sitting.
And people will start believing that statewide elected
officials make their decisions strictly on the merits, with no concern about
the politics, about the same time we have to start drafting people to run for
office.
Take Chiang’s "biography" on his official state controller’s
website, for example. In this
bio, his life begins when he was elected to office and "took immediate
action to weed out waste, fraud and abuse of public funds and make the State’s
finances more transparent and accountable to the public."
The rest follows the "and then I succeeded in" format,
suitable for moving directly to his next campaign mailer.
It’s also pretty funny to hear pundits, editorial writers
and others of the chattering class talk about how courageous Chiang was to
challenge a budget prepared by legislators of his own Democratic party.
Please. First, since Brown already had vetoed the budget,
the only purpose of Chiang’s analysis was to slap down the 120 legislators who
won’t be getting a paycheck. And the job approval numbers of the Legislature
are so deep in the tank that Chiang probably would have gotten a standing
ovation from voters if he suggested heating tar and stockpiling feathers.
Since Chiang never served in the Legislature, he doesn’t
have any political IOUs out in the Assembly or state Senate, which are both
filled with plenty of other ambitious politicians.
What would have taken real political courage would have been
for Chiang to release his exact same analysis if Brown had actually signed that
dog of a budget. Under 2004’s Prop. 58, which the controller cited as part of
his reason for pressing the issue, the Legislature has to pass a balanced
budget every year. But it wasn’t until this year, with the Legislature an easy
target, that Chiang rode down from the hills to shoot the wounded.
How would Schwarzenegger’s budgets have stood up to an
in-depth analysis by a self-appointed honest broker? You know, the budgets that
were balanced with federal money that everyone knew wasn’t coming, by cuts in
waste, fraud and abuse that never materialized or by savings were never going
to happen.
But that type of inside baseball study wouldn’t bring the
nationwide visibility – Hello, Fox News – you get from cutting off politicians’
paychecks.
That’s not to say the controller was wrong when he argued
that the budget wasn’t balanced. It wasn’t. But the gimmicks weren’t much
different or much worse than previous budgets that Schwarzenegger signed and
Chiang let go by.
The controller likely did the state and the governor a favor
by his decision, regardless of how the inevitable court battle turns out. For
now, at least, if legislators want their money, they’ve got to keep working on
a new and improved budget.
It’s the way it was done that’s disturbing, however. Chiang
himself admits that "nothing in the Constitution or state law gives the State
Controller the authority to judge the honesty, legitimacy or viability of the
state budget," and neither Prop. 25, which allowed legislators’ pay to be cut
off, or Prop. 58, the balanced budget measure, named the controller as the
final arbiter of all that is right and good.
"By inserting himself into the budgeting process and
substituting his judgment for the Legislature’s," said Democratic state Sen.
Noreen Evans, "the State Controller has set a dangerous legal precedent."
There’s nothing wrong with a politician acting like a
politician. It’s the nature of the beast. But when politics gets clothed in the
robes of good government, it’s time to worry.
John Wildermuth is a
longtime writer on California politics.