It looks like the Governor and the Legislature have resolved the issue over prison reform in the budget by setting that piece aside as a separate issue to be decided later.

Legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger defused an issue today that threatened to blow up a fragile compromise over the plan to erase the state’s $26.3-billion budget deficit.

Instead, Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, said both houses would vote on the plan Thursday night – but without an element that would prescribe details of a $1.2 billion cut in spending on prisons. A vote on that part of the plan will be delayed until next month, the leaders said.

“Everything’s on track,” said Steinberg, after he and Bass met privately with Schwarzenegger in his office. The governor popped out after the Democratic leaders left to dismiss the issue as just one of “some hiccups, and some obstacles and bumps in the road … there will be some difficult moments, but the bottom line is we are going to get this budget done.”

I see, so a plank of the budget that involves policy changes will be put off until another time.

Gee, that doesn’t seem to be the accommodation made for privatizing the welfare enrollment process.  Or enacting measures like background checks and fingerprinting for IHSS clients and recipients.  Or drilling at Tranquillon Ridge.  Or selling the State Compensation Insurance Fund.  Or the lobbyist-fueled deal to extend redevelopment projects and borrow against the funds.  All of those are huge policy changes, some of them unrelated to the current budget, that reflect mainly conservative perspectives.  They must be passed now, now, now, but because Republicans threw a fit and distorted the intent, a pretty modest (though necessary) prison reform part of the package, with savings of $1.2 billion dollars, gets delayed.

These dead of night budget deals and the disproportionate urgency placed on them are fruits of a poisoned, horrible broken process for determining budgets in this state.  It’s why everyone with a brain considers this not only a bad deal but one we’ll have to revisit in a few months anyway.

And this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the shame of the Democrats for giving in on virtually every part of this negotiation, without exception, and for failing to show the leadership for thirty years necessary to stand up to a broken process and actually do something about it.

In most public schools expect larger classes, fewer counselors and librarians, and a slimmer menu of arts classes and athletic programs — and maybe a tighter array of courses generally. More subtly, the quality of all services, from graduate programs at Berkeley to the condition – and maybe the safety – of the neighborhood park will decline. Will any of those things – and there are countless more – bring the realization that you can’t have a great state, or maybe even a decent one, on the cheap?

What’s badly wanted here is political leadership with courageous enough to talk about that link and not celebrate surrender to the anti-tax fanatics of the right. In this current budget deal, the Democrats got a few face-savers on education funding and welfare reductions, but in the end, despite all the nervous smiles, they lost.

The New York Times today writes that a “pinch of reality” has threatened the California dream.  Yet the political leadership still live in dreamworld, seemingly satisfied with the broken structure of government, confined to a short-term strategy and a political process that works for them as individuals but for none of their constituents, and just unable to operate against a minority the public hates but which runs circles around them.  We have deferred that California dream for so long that it may be unable to get it back.  But without a functioning democracy, and with a majority leadership that has practically abdicated responsibility in the face of a conservative veto, you can be sure of that proposition.

(We should all be asking these questions of our lawmakers. – promoted by David Dayen)

This is a relatively short action diary to gather information on the budget vote currently expected for Thursday.  I agree with David Dayan’s diary earlier today: this budget should not pass.  And if we can’t stop it, at least our representatives should understand that this is not a free vote;  if they vote to pass, there will be consequences not only to the state, but to their careers.

The idea here is one progressives have been using with great impact since the federal Social Security fight in 2005:  using the web as a grassroot’s whipping operation.

A few details below.  

This diary can be used to trade talking points that worked/did not work with the offices of various assembly members or senators, and any information about whether the member agreed to take a stand.

To your Senator or Assembly Representative, you should ask:

1. Will the member agree to vote against the budget, yes or no.
2. If the member is undecided, when the member intends to make up his/her mind.

Be firm, but be polite.

If anyone has specific advice for talking points, please add them to the comments.  I’ll try to work them into the main part of the diary.

What I’m hearing from grassroots progressives in this state is basically unadulterated anger at the craptacular budget deal passed.  If they’re not out in the streets they’re calling representatives and finding every opportunity to make themselves known.  Karen Bass posted a statement on her Facebook page about the budget deal and it has been hammered by critics.  Some negative comments have been deleted.  I’m getting practically an email a minute from some progressive group or another talking about stopping this budget.

I think what we have here is, to analogize, a union shop steward bargaining without the support of its rank and file.  Whether that will matter to the legislators who vote on this on Thursday is unclear.  But if you took the pulse of the activist community, they would argue for one of three things:

(1) send the leadership back to the negotiating table with the mandate that this deal isn’t good enough.

(2) send new leadership back to enforce that message, fire Steinberg and Bass

(3) only agree to a deal if Republicans ensure every one of their members will vote for it, so they can own the policy

I don’t want to really speculate on what will happen.  But I can pretty confidently say that the movement which has become engaged over this budget fight will not be likely to shut up if the Democratic rank-and-file goes along willingly with the leadership and votes this budget into law.  They will want to fight and it will probably be those same rank-and-file lawmakers that bear the brunt of it, perhaps even with primary challenges.

As I’ve said repeatedly, the current structure of government in the state is designed to produce bad outcomes.  We can get mad about it, we can mourn the real suffering this will extend throughout the poor and middle class, or we can organize.  And the desired end state, IMO, is not just to get a marginally better near-term budget, with maybe an extra billion for an oil severance tax here, or a reduction of borrowing to local governments there, but to get a far better structure inside of which to run government responsibly.  I don’t think that can possibly end with a fight on this budget, though it may begin with it.  Because at some point, progressives do need to reject being taken for granted.

Anyway, thought I’d open it for discussion.

…here’s Dave Johnson arguing for option #3, which I think is among the best practices.  We have this assumption that any deal must be voted on by all Democrats, with just enough Republicans for passage slinking along.  That’s not etched in stone.

In addition, let me remind everyone that this budget does NOT require a 2/3 vote.  The budget has already been passed; revising it requires only a majority.  However, that means it would take effect after 90 days, and only a 2/3 vote will allow it to take effect immediately.  Obviously, delaying by 90 days reduces the savings of the deal.  But we’re probably coming back to this soon enough anyway.  And without all Republicans in support, I think you have to allow some Democrats to vote their conscience.  

(In addition, budgets are voted on in various multi-bill packages, so any one vote could go down as well.  That could be a consideration.)

The Sacramento Bee committed an act of journalism today, taking a look at the consequences of the legislature failing to act on various bills in favor of solving the budget.

Merced County beekeeper Gene Brandi says he had enough problems before getting ensnared in the nasty war of words between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over California’s failure to cure its staggering budget deficit.

His Gene Brandi Apiaries in Los Banos, which once produced 400 drums of honey a year, has turned out just 20 drums so far this year as a searing drought has deprived wildland plants of the nectar that bees turn into honey.

And Brandi says he is facing competition from food processing companies that market sugar-added honey products as the real thing. “We’ve got people who take advantage of the good name of honey to try to sell their product,” he says.

Now some agricultural producers and Democratic lawmakers say Schwarzenegger and his aides are unfairly exploiting the good names of honey, blueberries, pomegranate juice – and cow tails – to bash legislators for fiddling while California burns.

The dust-up stirs debate over whether the budget mess should freeze out all other matters – or whether lawmakers still have a responsibility to continue the business of legislating, no matter how mundane it can appear.

Did this guy really ask to be turned into a punchline by the Governor?  I would argue that the crap that large multinational food producers package and sell as food is a serious problem on a variety of levels, not the least of which is public health.  And given 120 legislators with different committees and responsibilities, we are perfectly able, even with a budget crisis, to deal with additional legislation, particularly that which can make a difference to small businesses and the health and safety of the entire state.  In the past several years, with budget woes in every single one of them, somehow we passed a prescription drug benefit for seniors, an increase to the minimum wage, a landmark smart growth bill, and the Global Warmings Solutions Act, just to name a few.  

Ol’ Stogie And Jacuzzi is guilty of the exact same crime of turning every program that sounds funny, that includes animals or food, into an object of derision, as John McCain when he discussed so-called “pork” in the stimulus package:

McCain’s method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anythign that sounds silly. He’s clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. Here is Dowd recording McCain’s twitter postings:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. …

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” …

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

I don’t know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there’s a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I do know that the tattoo-removal program is an effective anti-crime initiative — it allows rehabilitated former to reenter society shorn of visible markings that cut them off from middle-class culture. McCain and Dowd don’t know this, and they don’t care. What’s on display is the worst elements of political demagoguery meeting the worst elements of the instant-reaction internet culture. They think the very idea of trying to learn about something before you take a position on it is a joke.

Who could have expected that going with a chief executive this simple-minded could lead us to such a place of ruin?

Something’s a-stirring for the second straight night in Sacramento.  Scott Lay @ccleague and the indefatigable John Myers @KQED_CapNotes will have the best play-by-play.  The Senate has scheduled a session but immediately went into party caucuses for meetings.  If they do hit the floor, CalChannel will have it.

Basically, here’s the latest: The Senate and Assembly have already passed majority-vote budget revisions that would fill the current deficit, but the Governor has vowed to veto them.  The Assembly, with bipartisan support, passed three bills in a stop-gap measure, which would at least provide savings for $3 billion in fiscal year 08-09, which ends tomorrow, and would keep money flowing in state coffers for another few weeks, avoiding IOUs.  The stop-gap consists entirely of cuts and gimmicky delays in funding, by the way.  The Governor has no plan whatsoever to recoup that $3 billion if passage of the stop-gap fails by the deadline.

What the Governor has done is create a completely new budget plan with a day to go before the deadline.  Some would call that deliberate.  This “Plan B” budget would not eliminate Healthy Families, CalWORKS or Cal Grants, nor would it cut all funding for state parks, which was apparently a bridge too far.  It would accept the one-day delay in state employee paychecks from June 30, 2010 to July 1, “saving” the state $1.2 billion.  However, the new plan would borrow $2 billion from local governments, the maximum allowable under the old Prop. 1A; reduce state worker salaries, benefits and pensions; and make broader cuts over various different programs to make up the gap.

Schwarzenegger has appeared to back off from the worst cuts he proposed initially, a win for the grassroots and legislative Dems, but the steady stream of changes to his proposals, along with an insistence on the June 30 deadline for a full solution, have conspired to virtually assure that the deadline will be missed.  This is the backdrop for tonight’s Senate action.  If they can get two GOP votes for the stop-gap solution, they can actually override a gubernatorial veto and set into law something to at least extend the process by a few weeks.  I don’t know about the likelihood of that, but the choices have become limited.

Meanwhile, the Yacht Party made a tiny ad buy on the budget to try and get people to notice they exist.

I’ll monitor if anything interesting happens…

…from Myers: “One more night…to search our souls.” -Senate pro Tem Steinberg on Senate floor. No agreement tonite. New fiscal year about 26 hrs away.

…and it looks like nothing interesting happened.  They took a vote on the stop-gap, didn’t get the 2/3 required to override Arnold’s veto, and adjourned until tomorrow morning.  Looks like we’ll have late night with the legisature Day 3 tomorrow, as the midnight deadline looms.

In case you weren’t following along in the middle of the night, Assembly Democrats passed a majority vote budget that solves the entire $24 billion dollar deficit, as the Governor requested.  Through a maneuver found legal and Constitutional by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst, the Assembly added a $1.50 per pack cigarette tax, a 9.9% oil severance tax on producers, and a $15 surcharge in the vehicle license fee to fund state parks, in addition to the homeowner insurance fee to fund emergency response systems, which was included in the Governor’s initial budget revision.  The new taxes amount to $2 billion of the $24 billion solution.  The majority of actions in this alternative budget remain cuts.  And according to Noreen Evans, the Senate will take up this majority-vote budget later today.

The majority approach was not our first choice. We spent weeks in Conference Committee pursuing a bipartisan budget solution. But we have hit a wall. And, we cannot afford to wait any longer. We are 48 hours away from the state plunging into financial ruin. The Legislature has a duty to act with or without Republicans for the good of California […]

As the old saying goes: lead, follow, or get out of the way. By voting against cuts and revenues tonight, the basis of any budget, Republicans ran from their responsibility to govern.

We gave legislative Republicans a chance to lead with us through a month of public hearings in the Conference Committee. That was the opportunity to present alternative budget proposals. Republicans squandered this opportunity.

If the Senate passes this and puts it on the Governor’s desk within 24 hours of the deadline to stop the state from issuing IOUs, he will have a simple choice to make.  Will he shut down the government because he failed to get everything he wanted from the legislature?  I suspect he will, actually.  And indeed, he has issued a statement to this effect, saying that he wants a “budget that solves our entire deficit without raising taxes.”

That’s the short-term state of affairs.  Going forward, the process itself is fundamentally broken, a fact that the state’s political media class has decided to notice in a boomlet of “How to fix California” articles over the past week.  I look forward to those debates.  If the Governor vetoes this budget, he will be shutting down the government and forestalling the effort to finally reform the process.

…more from the Governor, as he vows to veto this bill, calling it “illegal,” which is pretty far.  It is worth noting that, since most of this budget revision would not take effect for 90 days because none of them received a 2/3 vote, it is true that such a solution would not completely impact the immediate cash-flow problem.  Although, you could argue that putting such a solution in place would allow the state to borrow from investors.

I certainly don’t remember this hand being tipped anywhere prior to tonight, but there’s some activity going on in the Assembly with the budget.  Democrats appear poised to pass a majority-vote solution on about $2 billion or so in taxes, using some tax swaps and fee increases to pass the taxes on oil severance and tobacco, among other things.  Added to the other $21.5 billion that could conceivably be passed under a majority vote, that would fulfill the Governor’s requirement that all $24 billion be included in whatever solution gets reached.  The expectation would be that the Governor veto this majority-vote fee increase.  However, with the IOUs at the ready and the tax increases so small relative to the total budget, one wonders if Schwarzenegger can get away with such a veto.  If on the off chance that Arnold does sign this budget, the whole thing would probably head to the courts.

It’s unclear if the Senate will follow suit tonight.  And all of this is happening in the midst of negotiating sessions with the Governor, called a “stick-and-carrot approach” by the SacBee (I always thought it was carrot and stick, but there you are).  The Governor, for his part, continues inserting unrelated items into the deal, like pension changes for state employees that even he acknowledges would not impact the current budget year.

…for those late to the party, a bit of an explainer on how the majority vote process works:

Sunday night’s package included a 9.9 percent tax on oil production, a $1.50-per-package tax on cigarettes, and a $15 per vehicle registration fee.

While tax hikes normally require a two-thirds’ approval, Democrats argued that by eliminating an 18-cent-per-gallon excusive tax on gasoline, the net revenue to the state becomes zero and thus doesn’t represent a tax hike. Sunday’s bills would then replace the excise tax with an equivalent fee, which Democrats argue does not require a two-thirds’ vote.

Perfectly legal, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Counsel.

…The Assembly passed the tax increase 44-30, with 6 not voting.  I’m assuming that the 30 no votes were the 29 Republicans and independent Juan Arambula, who announced that he would not support this part of the budget bill earlier in the night.  The Senate has adjourned but the Assembly appears to be plowing through their entire budget.  Interesting.

…You can watch the Assembly proceedings on Cal Channel, by the way.

The Governor’s shock-doctrine approach to the current budget crisis became very apparent this week, as he engineered rejections of bipartisan stop-gap measures and solutions that would cover $21.5 billion of a $24 billion dollar deficit.  He clearly would rather essentially shut down the state government than participate in the normal political process of compromise and negotiation.  This is his chance to be a dictator, and he is banking on the desire of Democrats not to watch the lights go out in Sacramento to push through his agenda.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeking to conquer what could be the last budget crisis of his tenure, is engaged in a high-stakes negotiating strategy with lawmakers that could force him to preside over a meltdown of state government.

As legislators have scrambled to stop the state from postponing payment of its bills and issuing IOUs starting next week, the governor has vowed to veto any measure that fails to close the state’s entire $24-billion deficit […]

The governor readily admits that he sees the crisis as a chance to make big changes to government — to “reform the system,” he said Friday — with proposals he has struggled to advance in the past.

Among them: reorganizing state bureaucracy, eliminating patronage boards and curbing fraud in social services that Democrats have traditionally protected. The governor also would like to move past the budget crisis to reach a deal on California’s water problems that has so far eluded him.

By agreeing to a partial budget solution such as one the Assembly approved Thursday, the governor would lose leverage to accomplish many of those things. Without the pressure of imminent insolvency, Democrats might be less likely to agree to his demands.

This is a dangerous strategy – not for Schwarzenegger himself, but for the hundreds of thousands of Californians who depend on a functioning state government every day.  Contrary to popular belief, the recipients of these IOUs would not be debtholders or vendors, but the most vulnerable people in society – families on welfare, the elderly, the blind, the disabled, and poor college students with state aid grants.  These are the pawns in the game Arnold has been playing.

The Governor has brought back to the table long-sought goals that he wishes to implement over the protests of a majority of the legislature.  Some of them are described in his weekly radio address.  The LA Times has a good synopsis here:

Back on the governor’s demand list is a plan to cut the pensions received by state workers, which unions have stymied before but which he thinks may gain traction with a cash-strapped public. Schwarzenegger also views this as an ideal time to once again target growth and fraud in the state’s multibillion-dollar in-home healthcare program, which employs 300,000 unionized workers.

His agenda includes anti-fraud efforts and tougher enrollment requirements for the state’s food stamp programs, efforts that advocates for the poor say are designed to discourage people from participating. In his radio address, he said the state and counties could get by with a “fraction” of the 27,000 workers now handling eligibility for Medi-Cal and food stamps by using Web-based enrollment.

Schwarzenegger has revived plans to allow local school districts to contract out for services like school bus transportation and lawn maintenance, a proposal favored by the GOP but despised by school employee unions.

Arnold has basically taken the lesson of the GOP, holding the budget hostage for pet projects like privatization and purging state services rolls of the dependent (I’m sure a lot of the desperately poor have Web access to fill out their forms).

One wonders if this will finally color the local coverage of the Governor, which throughout his tenure has been fawning, even in the face of near-historic unpopularity.  Some reporters seem to be coming around.

So the Senate Republicans voted en masse against $11 billion in cuts as part of the budget proposal put forward by the Democrats today.  Lou Correa and Leland Yee voted no as well, and the final vote was 22-16.  Technically, I believe the bill could go to the Assembly, and after passage to the Governor, but Arnold has vowed a veto, so that’s probably out.  Meanwhile, California will start to use the reserve fund to pay bills for the next week or so, and failing a solution after that, will resort to IOUs, which basically was the deal back in February as well.  Yes, the Democratic proposal has its share of gimmickry, but no more than the Governor’s own plan, and considering the Yacht Party refuses to write a plan, ALL OF THEIRS is gimmickry, as is their entire ideology.  But the Yacht Party smells blood in the water, the Democrats have pulled their tax proposals off the table, and the future is incredibly uncertain.  

I cannot disagree with Greg Lucas’ analysis.

Examining the Senate’s budgetary actions of June 24 from a political rather than a policy perspective, the majority party Democrats may not have achieved their objectives […]

Judging from the remarks of Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat, the intent of the exercise was to illustrate that Democrats are unwilling to cut as deeply into social programs as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and to portray Republican lawmakers as obstructionist or hypocritical or both for not backing the cuts embraced by Democrats.

“Democrats are asking Republicans to vote for billions of dollars in cuts and apparently your answer today is ‘no,’ Steinberg said. “Why won’t you cut? Why won’t you cut?” […]

In a purely political sense, the “bad” vote is the one cast by Democrats, ostensibly champions of public education, who – if the February budget they backed is included – have chosen to reduce state support of schools by more than $12 billion over a two-year period.

Republicans can portray their “no” vote as a refusal to cut nearly $5 billion more from public schools.

Perhaps a more effective illustration of support for what Democrats call the safety net would be to bring several of the GOP governor’s more draconian proposals to a vote.

It seems unlikely Schwarzenegger’s call to eliminate California’s welfare program would garner the votes necessary for passage. Nor would the governor’s proposal to end state grants to lower-income high school students to help them attend college.

After rejecting those and possibly other gubernatorial proposals then a vote on the more modest – more humane – measure with $11 billion in cuts might more satisfactorily frame the issue.

I would argue that making these “symbolic” votes doesn’t do a ton of good unless you’re willing to use them in the context of the 2010 campaign (and I don’t remember votes coming into play in key districts in 2008) or in a coordinated and widespread media campaign immediately.  To the latter point, we don’t have any such media in California.  It’s a good argument in search of a broadcaster, and that goes for Lucas’ alternative solution.

The real problem is that Democrats don’t appear to have an endgame strategy, and haven’t for years.  The words “two-thirds majority” hasn’t exited anyone’s lips in quite a while.  This is a process problem, and only a process solution will suffice, and teachable moments like these have been wasted for 30 years.  

With Juan Arambula apparently leaving the Democratic Party, a day before both chambers were scheduled to vote on the Democratic alternative budget, it’s striking how little difference this will make.  Because the legislature will not vote to enact a budget but to revise it, on everything but tax increases they need only a majority vote.  And the way that the Democrats structured their version, less than 10% of the bill include solutions requiring a 2/3 vote.   And Assembly Democrats still hold a 49-29-1 advantage even if Arambula becomes an independent.  What’s more, the leadership structured a fallback option should those oil and tobacco taxes go down, along with a couple repeals of corporate tax breaks passed in February.  Presumably they would simply shrink the budget reserve and pass the same budget, and that could also be done on a majority-vote basis – actually they could pass the oil and cigarette taxes through a majority-vote fee swap, if they really wanted to, although I reluctantly agree with this article that Democrats are probably posturing, knowing they don’t have the votes and hoping to at least fork some Republicans on “voting with Big Tobacco and Big Oil.  It’s simply good politics to do so, but that’s a small consolation to those who may see their services cut as a result.

There is a cost to passing these revisions by majority vote, however, because anything done in this fashion will take effect 90 days out, while a 2/3 vote for any revision would take effect immediately.  Obviously, with a 90-day lag the savings will not be as robust on the cuts, requiring yet another go-round of this at the end of the year, which was probably inevitable anyway given the lack of revenue filling state coffers.  And of course, that will be on the heads of those Republicans who don’t vote for these solutions, those “fiscally responsible” types who will cost the state money by failing to fast-track these revisions.  Let’s hope, beyond hope, that actually reaches the headlines.

The point to all this is that the Democrats’ budget will provide a significant amount of pain, which is why they don’t have to put up too much of a fight to get it passed.  The side-by-side comparison of the two budgets shows pretty clearly that Democrats accepted a substantial amount of the cuts, and also some of the gimmicks that the Governor had in his plan.  They added a couple tax increases but not the broad restructuring of government necessary to protect the most vulnerable.  They repealed a couple corporate tax breaks for CEOs but not as many as they could have.  If you’re going to engage in what George Skelton calls Kabuki theater, since you’re delivered a fallback plan, don’t compromise the Kabuki and instead create the real vision for the state that you desire, something that the grassroots, just getting their feet wet in this fight, can rally behind.  Or maybe, the Democratic caucus DID, a somewhat terrifying thought.