It’s no secret that not everybody in the Democratic institutional organizational front has been totally on board with Gov. Brown’s plan on the budget.  But until this point, dissent has been quiet and not out in the media.  The President of the California Teachers Association changed that recently:

“I believe that as much as our governor has been extremely transparent and honest in doing what he told folks he’d do – which is let the people decide – it’s too late for that,” Sanchez said in a phone interview. “Once you put it on the ballot after June, it’s no longer an extension, it becomes new taxes. And once they’re new taxes, the people won’t support that. I think the Legislature ought to do that themselves.”(SacBee)

Now, Sanchez makes some good points here.  He is correct on the ballot prospects. Most of the polling that I’ve seen shows a very difficult passage for a measure that is merely a resumption of the former taxes rather than just an extension of the Arnold Schwarzenegger increases.  It could probably be done, but it would take a fair bit of money to make it happen.

On the other hand, passing the taxes in the Legislatures is “merely” a matter of getting two Republican votes in each house.  That would be something approaching a Herculean task in the current climate.  It would mean finding legislators who were unwilling to even put it on the ballot who would want to actually pass the taxes.  Perhaps it happens as the all-cuts budget becomes the nightmare that it will eventually become, but the odds seem long, perhaps longer than passing a tax measure on the ballot.

Sure, Brown would have to ditch his campaign promise, but those things happen.  Regrettable perhaps, but political realities make for difficult choices.

But, perhaps this is a more reasoned play (and not really all that troubling to the Brown administration) than you might initially suspect.  This is a far better bargaining position than what Brown started off with of only getting Republican votes for a ballot measure. Why not demand more from them?

Going back to the ballot, whether through the initiative process or the Legislature, really isn’t looking all that attractive.  And that’s the reality that CTA and others are looking at.  Eventually, sometime this spring, some consensus will have to form on a plan to move forward, but that just needs a bit more hashing.