By Tim Redmond
We all know that the main reason we don’t have a budget deal is that everyone — but particularly the governor and the Republicans — wants to escape from this mess with his or her political hide intact. The GOP members all signed a moronic pledge never to raise taxes, and the ones who wind up voting for even minor tax hikes get slammed in their home districts. The Democrats don’t want to cut education or health or other essential services, but have been far more willing to compromise. The governor just wants to look tough.
Seriously — he just wants to look tough, and the longer the standoff continues, the more he gets this sort of press, and the more his abysmal poll numbers go up.
So now the talks are still stalled and the state is losing $25 million a day just to make a washed-up action-movie star happy with his image.
Even after the “big five” — the leaders of the Legislature and the guv — come to a deal, it’s no sure thing. Because in the past, all of the Republicans have refused to vote for deals that their own leadership and their own governor have put together.
And some Democrats may not vote for it, either. Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco told me he won’t vote for any cuts to education. “The Republicans have drawn a line and said no new taxes,” he told me. “We need to draw a line and say no more cuts to health care and education.”
In fact, in the famous late-night session that almost led to a budget deal last week, Yee was holding out, refusing to go along with the cuts until State Sen. President Darrell Steinberg called the lobbyists from the teacher’s unions at 11:30 pm and told them to tell Yee it was okay to accept the leadership plan.
Yee, of course, wants to be able to say after the dirty deal is done that he refused to accept the cuts. So do a lot of the other Dems — but at some point, most of them will bit the bullet and accept some kind of bad deal to end the IOUs and keep the state afloat. Yee wants to see the GOP take some of the heat, too: “If the governor wants us to vote for a bad budget deal, he needs to make the Republicans vote for it, too,” he said.
Which also won’t happen.
So the most likely outcome is that the Democrats will be the ones voting for a shitty deal that screws all of the traditional Democratic constituencies.
I’m sick of being held hostage by Orange County. It’s time to split up this state.