And no, it’s not their fear of seeing their heads on a stick. And don’t believe that the ransom list had anything to do with their real issues. Restoring 23 million in cuts to rural state fairs? Please.

Republicans never wanted to agree to pension reform because it was the only single issue where the public agrees with them.

If Republicans were at all serious abut solving problems, they would have jumped at the deal that Jerry Brown had negotiated.

There was a  significant package of reforms agreed to by the Brown Administration that would have made a huge dent in California’s pensions problem. And let’s make it clear that there is no crisis but there are some serious problems, particularly with the unsustainable costs of public safety pensions for local governments.

The package that Brown had agreed to would have made major progress towards reducing long-term pension costs and bringing some of the worst-hit pension funds into balance quickly. Judging from the Republicans’ release of their ransom demands, here are the pension areas where there was agreement;

o No purchases of Air-Time (Admin: OK)

o Highest 5-year average. (Admin: Highest 3 year average, with CalSTRS exception for 25 years of service)

o Base pay [salary only – no vacation, overtime, car allowance, uniform allowance, etc.] used for determining final retirement benefits. (Admin: Base benefits on regular, recurring pay)

o No Double-Dipping /Revolving Door (Admin: Allow retired annuitants (cost effective for state), but forbid drawing a full-time salary and a pension from the same employer).

o Cap Final pension amount (Admin: Ok w/Cap of $106K w/COLA – same as Social Security – and additional 12.4% for non-SS employees.)

The biggest of these, if applied statewide, would be the use of regular recurring pay without overtime in calculating pensions rather than adding in overtime. A pension cap would also save real money, and move higher-paid employees into a hybrid plan if they wanted to maintain their income in retirement. Rank and file workers and teachers are protected. Overly generous benefits for public safety come back down.

So why wouldn’t Republicans agree to fix the biggest problem?

The answer is very easy. Anger about overly generous public employee pensions is the only single issue where the Republicans’ messaging polls well.

Without pensions as a rallying cry, Republicans are left with a series of positions that are wildly unpopular with Californians;

   Gutting environmental regulation and increasing off shore drilling

   Bigger tax breaks for the largest corporations at the expense of small business

   Massive cut backs to public education and public safety

   Maintaining a judicial-prison-industrial complex that most Californians want to cut

   Immigrant bashing

Republicans could have eliminated the most obvious form of waste and corruption, redevelopment agencies and enterprise zones. While both of these have supporters, and occasionally have great results, they are tremendously inefficient and frequently just result in a race between cities as to who can come up with the worst deal for taxpayers as they scramble to lure big box retailers, auto malls, the hotels near convention centers, and businesses located in nearby cities.

The savings that local governments would have had on pension reforms would have more than made up for any of their losses from new pet redevelopment projects.

Cynical Republican politicians have never wanted to eliminate waste or corruption or reform pensions. They only want to be able to win enough elections to exercise a minority veto power over what most Californians want.