George Skelton, the consummate insider, takes some time out from guarding the palace gates, to take a whack at the extortion coming from the Republicans (and Intuit):

Whatever the beef, there could be wide, unintended damage to noncombatants. The Republican weapon was blatant abuse of the two-thirds majority vote requirement for passage of many bills.

The two-thirds rule is not used merely to protect taxpayers from politicians trying to reach deeper into their pockets. It’s used by special interests — mainly big business — to game the system; a tool handy for legislative leverage, or extortion. If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll withhold the votes needed for the two-thirds. (LA Times 9/17/09)

See, that’s the problem when you give a wide, expansive veto power to a minority.  It’s fundamentally unworkable.  I’ll make an analogy to my patent law days here.  Sometimes a patent holder owns a patent on part of a device or process.  They frequently try to expand the scope and power of that patent by contract and license to block other firms from using or selling something that isn’t covered by the patent.

See the thing is with patents, when you do that, it’s called an anti-trust violation. It’s against the law.  But with the supermajority in the Legislature, it’s just par for the course.

Sen. Maldonado, quite possibly the loneliest Legislator, shunned by his own party and the Democrats, makes the theoretical argument.

“I was embarrassed,” says Sen. Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria, the only Republican to cross party lines and vote for the bills. “I said, ‘I’m here to govern.’ They wanted all three things or nothing.

“The two-thirds vote is a good tool when put in the hands of people who are reasonable, pragmatic and open-minded. But partisans use the two-thirds as a tool to hold up the Legislature.

And if wishes were unicorns, then we’d all live in Arnold’s Fantasyland. But back here in the real world, this is how this is going to play out every time.  A minority will wield its minority veto like a club and bash everybody over the head with it until they get their way.  That’s just the way it is.