Nope, not an April Fool’s joke.  Anne Gust, who has always been a powerful advisor to Jerry Brown since they met back in the early nineties, doesn’t really suffer fools.  Apparently, she wasn’t really liking what she saw out of Senate Minority Leader Bob Dutton.  Dutton went crying to the media:

Dutton said first lady Anne Gust Brown “yelled” at him in one meeting with the governor last Wednesday over a lack of cooperation.

“Frankly, I was yelled at more than I was talked to,” Dutton said, “and mostly by Mrs. Brown, not even Gov. Brown.”

Brown press secretary Gil Duran blasted Dutton later.

“And the dog barked at him, too,” Duran said. “Big girls don’t cry. The real issue here is the fact that schoolchildren, the elderly and the poor are going to be crushed if these reckless Republicans don’t get their act together and make a reasonable deal for the good of the people. Given the magnitude of the situation, we really don’t have time for Bob Dutton’s feelings.”(SacBee)

Is this supposed to make Californians like him better? Respect Jerry less? What? I’m just not sure what the gain for Dutton is with this story.

At any rate, at this point it doesn’t even seem to matter.  Jerry is working on addressing some of the issues in the ransom note in his own manner, and just leaving the Republicans behind.  Some of the issues need to be addressed, and others are something of a red herring trumped up for political reasons. As for the budget, it looks like we’ll be heading for a bloody May revise through the traditional budget schedule.

I’ll admit it, I’m something of a cynic.  I was always worried about the budget process and whether we would get the 2 votes necessary for the supermajority.  I pretty much knew that the Republicans wouldn’t put straight taxes as an option, but maybe, just maybe, they would consider some sort of deal for an election.

Well, time’s up on that:

Gov. Jerry Brown announced this afternoon he halted negotiations with legislative Republicans over a deal to place taxes on the ballot to help resolve California’s remaining $15.4 billion deficit.

A June election appears to be off the table entirely. Brown is no longer pursuing a two-thirds vote for a June tax election, while Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, told reporters he will not pursue a majority-vote option, either.

“Yesterday, I stopped the discussions that I had been conducting with various members of the Republican party regarding our state’s massive deficit,” Brown said in a statement this afternoon. “The budget plan that I put forth is balanced between deep cuts and extensions of currently existing taxes and I believe it is in the best interest of California. Under our constitution, however, two Republicans from the Assembly and two from the Senate must agree before this matter can be put to the people.”(SacBee)

The Governor also sent a letter to Republican Senate Leader Bob Dutton asking him to “get working” on something, and to pair his reform requests down to spending cap, pension reform, and “regulatory reform.”  You can view the letter here.  But in the end, I struggle to see how anything gets done at this point without signatures.  It is just unfortunate that now we’re going to have to wait to get that done.

This is truly a bad day for California, and a sad statement for our government.

Here’s the thing: The Republicans understand that there have to be some additional revenues.  They know that even they couldn’t come up with the full $25 Billion in cuts in any way that could possibly help them politically. But, on the other side, they are terrified of their own base.

This is where it gets interesting.  Sen. Bob Dutton, the Republican Leader in the Senate asked the Legislative Counsel if there is any way for the Democrats to put something on the ballot on their own, sans the 2/3 majority.  Now, Dutton would probably tell you out in public that this is just to stop the tax hikes or something like that.  But, you have to think that Dutton was secretly hoping that the Democrats could do the dirty work while the Republicans could maintain their ideological purity by never voting for anything that possibly resembles an increase in taxes.

Speaker Perez, for his part, doesn’t seem to be taking the bait, and has cast that aside right from the get-go:

Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez said Wednesday that he has no intention of sidestepping Republicans by trying to place a tax-extension measure on the June ballot by a simple majority vote of the Legislature.

Pérez downplayed a legislative counsel’s opinion, sought by Senate Republican leader Bob Dutton, that indicated such a measure could be placed before voters without the support of GOP lawmakers, under narrow circumstances.

“No,” Pérez said flatly when asked if he is entertaining such a plan for the tax measure proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise $11 billion for the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2012.

“There is not a single legal analysis that I think holds any water that says we could legitimately put this question before voters on a simple majority vote,” Pérez told the Sacramento Press Club. (SacBee)

I’ll admit, I’m a bit split on this move.  From a practical standpoint, I’m a bit skeptical that the Democrats will, in fact, be able to lure enough GOP votes.  Keeping open the majority vote measure as a way to whip some GOP votes into making some sort of deal seems to make some sense.

But, guessing at the Speaker’s logic here, in order to pass this thing at the ballot, you are probably going to need at least nominal GOP support.  If you have them running around saying how awful this package is, it could create a pretty dicey situation for the actual election.

At any rate, despite the Speaker’s protests, I would still not count out the concept of a majority vote measure quite yet.  

I was going to put this as a comment to Dave’s diary about the Year of Doing Your Job, but, well, I thought it could stand as a compliment to that post. Sen. Dutton’s calling it a fiscal crisis, but really he just wants the governor to hack up the budget. You’ll remember him as being one of the Senate Obstructionists over the budget a few months ago. I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure he was one of the senators hanging out at Chops when the Democrats were trying to work out a Budget.  But ol Bob wants to call a “fiscal crisis”.  Oooh, that sounds scary, what’s it mean? Well, Arnold would get to hack away at the budget.

Under Proposition 58 passed in 2004, the governor could declare a fiscal emergency if he determines revenue is “substantially below” what was anticipated in the budget and summon the Legislature into special session.

“If we don’t do something now … to deal with this crisis, we could find ourselves right back where we were five years ago,” Dutton said following a Senate budget committee hearing in the Capitol on Tuesday.

The administration’s Department of Finance cautioned that it was too soon to make such a call. (SacBee 11.28.07)

Well, wow, Arnold’s showing some restraint? Or could it perhaps have to do with the fact that he has no real desire to see the budget reopened. Because that went so well the last time. We are going to have some fiscal problems coming up, but the Republicans refuse to look at raising revenues. They simply seek to slash spending. MediCal? Who needs it? Not my family.

How can you negotiate when you are negotiating with your self. The Republicans refuse to look at the entirety of the issue, but yet demand answers now? To call it shortsighted is putting it kindly.