Jerry Brown desperately wants an election for the beginning of June. However, in order to make that happen, there has to be some sort of agreement on how the Democratic majority is going to subjugate itself to the whims of the extremist Republican minority.  So, the so-called “Republican 5,” a group of 5 Republican Senators who consider themselves open to putting taxes on the ballot, spent the weekend at Jerry’s place to see if they could work something out.

Spoiler Alert: They didn’t:

Tom Harman, one of five Republicans who negotiated with Gov. Jerry Brown, said Monday that budget talks broke down this weekend over fundamental disagreements on a permanent spending cap and pension changes.

The Huntington Beach Republican said the group has no more talks scheduled with the Democratic governor. He believes talks will shift either to a “Big 5” discussion between Brown and the four legislative leaders or that Democrats will pursue a majority-vote budget solution.

Harman said the five Republicans wanted ballot measures that would impose a permanent hard cap on future state spending and reduce pension benefits for current state workers. Those issues were non-starters for Democrats.(SacBee)

Apparently it isn’t that they were willing to consider something reasonable, they were just the advance team to get Republican will like they have done for every single year during the budget process.  This way, you can have Tony Strickland, the guy who beat his Democratic opponent by a few hundred votes, can form his Teaparty group and claim that they will never even let voters vote, while still playing the same old game that they have been playing since 1978.

They are trying to go all Scott Walker on the state, but they are even bolder.  At least Walker was democratically elected.  Sure, he didn’t have a mandate to do what he did, but these guys don’t even have the benefit of even winning a statewide election.  In a year that was supposed to be a Republican sweep, they couldn’t even push one Republican across the line.  And somehow they are trying to pull off what is essentially a legislative coup.

You can’t say they don’t have some serious gumption.  You can say, however, that they lack a basic sense of fairness and right and wrong.

Back in 2009, I had the good fortune to help defeat Prop 1A, that included the spending cap.  And despite the corpse of Howard Jarvis claiming that was all about taxes, I can assure you that the Progressive base was none too enthused about it.  Prop 1A had no constituency because it was too far to the right, and too far to the, um Arnold Schwarzenegger.  By 2009, it was clear that Arnold had no constituency, and yet the Democrats, for the most part, proceeded hand in hand with him.

And while the hard spending cap was defeated, we still lost a lot in that election.  Quite possibly, we may have taken the idea of real revenue enhancements, oil severance, a revised and more progressive income tax structure, that sort of thing, and pulled right off the table.  We are now in the position that Brown is doing his best to get the best deal he can, and he’s just hoping for some extensions of the regressive taxes that we already have in place.

So now we are are down to the wire.  If we are to get an election for June, we’ll need to have something passed through the Legislature with in the next week, ten days at the latest.  A majority vote measure carries a lot of risk, and Brown knows this.  Whether we are forced to walk the line, we’ll know in a few more days.

Incidentally, Brown also announced the date of the CA-36 special election.  The primary, which will feature at least 3 candidates from the two major parties, will be May 17, and the top two vote getters will meet in a rematch on July 12.