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CA Republicans Cave

By: scipio62 (Diary)  |  February 19th, 2009 at 10:37 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Kansas Republicans stood firm against Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ attempt to tax refunds and paychecks for government workers hostage in that state’s recent budget crisis:

Sebelius’ budget director had asked the Kansas Finance Council — made up of Sebelius and eight top lawmakers — to approve the transfers Monday to get the state through a cash-flow problem. The state had already borrowed $550 million from healthy funds since July.

But the council’s Republican members argued the state couldn’t legally borrow any more from itself until it had a plan to erase its deficit. They called on Sebelius to sign a bill making reductions to the budget. Sebelius signed the bill and ended the standoff Tuesday.

The move alleviated Republican concerns, and the State Finance Council’s vote Wednesday was unanimous.

How much do you want to bet Sebelius wants out of Kansas as soon as possible?

On the other hand, California Republicans stuck it to the taxpayers earlier this morning, passing a $14 billion tax increase to go with $15 billion in so-called spending cuts and $11 billion in borrowing. Despite removing their Senate Minority Leader, he and a couple of others voted with the Democrats. In order to get the vote of one Republican, state Senator Abel Maldonado, here’s what was negotiated:

In exchange for Maldonado’s vote to raise taxes, Democrats agreed to place on the June 2010 ballot a pair of political reforms long sought by the senator: an overhaul of the state’s electoral system to do away with partisan primaries and a refusal to raise lawmakers pay when the state is running a deficit.

Tell me how either of these things actually fix California’s government spending problems. Yeah, yeah, I know…rhetorical question.

One proposal that was removed was a 12-cent/gallon gas tax. But, taxes are going up on these items: “a temporary 1-cent sales tax beginning in April, a personal income tax surcharge, and a vehicle license fee increase.” There’s more information in the piece, and I encourage everyone to go read it.

The article states that some Republicans believe agreeing to the deal could be a career-ender. And well it should be. We’ve already seen what happens when a very few Republican legislators act like Democrats; the taxpayers get stuck paying the bill. It’s time for conservatives to start electing Republicans who actually believe in the conservatism the party claims to believe in, and get rid of those taking the state, and the country, to the brink of bankruptcy. One step would be to put up a credible Republican against the spend-happy Governator.

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COMMENTS

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  • IJB

    …Would be much more accurate.

    Otherwise, we might as well blame national Republicans for Specter, Snowe and Collins.

  • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

    These will be permanent taxes, mark my words. But no one is mentioning the real cave-in

    The real cave-in is the failure of the Republicans to take on the public employee unions, especially SEIU. This is the fastest road to fiscal ruin as unfunded pensioin liabilities and excessive numbers of government employees – and their poltical stranglehold tightens on the throats of CA taxpayers.

    The Democrats will double-cross on the spending cap, opposing the initiative while at the same time putting on an initiative to end the 2/3rds budget vote in 2010.

    They and their media allies starting today will go on the offensive putting all the blame for budget problems on the Republicans and saying that the solution is to get rid of the 2/3rds requirement. Add a Democratic governor in the 2010 election and it’s the end of fiscal repsonsibility.

  • Achance

    Swartznegger gave it his best shot politically, got his head handed to him, and decided that since the house was burning, he’d keep warm. Can’t say I blame him; in order be a good governor, you have to BE governor.

    CA has probably the worst union security provisions of any state. The employer has no say at all in whether a union can impose a compelled dues scheme. If the union in its own election votes by a majority to have a union or agency shop, it has one and the employer has to observe the union security provision, take the dues, and fire employees who don’t pay them.

    The only way to do anything is to challenge the dues schemes in the courts. Even though dues money is pretty openly being used and used against Republicans, I’m not sure the Party would have standing but it could find some employees who are or who will become dues objectors and have them sue the unions. As I’ve said many times, there isn’t a union in America whose dues structure could withstand constitutional scrutiny but you’d have to be prepared to go all the way to the USSC and to lose at every step in state court, the federal district court, and probably the 9th Circuit as well. The Ninth is actually pretty good on individual rights issues like this. but they do read the papers and would see the political impact of throwing out CA’s compelled dues scheme. You’d want to get the whole law thrown out so they’d have to start over. After about three months of dues being voluntary, dues paying “membership” in most unions will drop by 75% or more and the unions won’t have all that money to throw against a Republican. It would be better to coordinate it with some other states as well, so the unions can feel some fear and not be so willing to throw money from other states at CA.

    I just refused to enforce AFSCME’s union security clause after contract expiration and impasse here and had them down to only about a quarter of their membership paying dues. They were racked and stacked for decertification, but Republican fratricide elected Tony Knowles and he saved them.

  • IJB

    Right now CA Lefties are being insulated from the consequences of their own politics.

    Eliminating the super majority requirement for budgeting is the one thing that will finally end that farce. Either CA Libs will finally figure out that their politics are hurting *themselves* in the pocketbook as CA Dems massively skyrocket taxes every years, or the state will simply collapse.

    But either outcome is preferable to the farce we have now.

    If they ever put an Initiative on the ballot to allow majority vote budgeting, I for one will definitely be voting for it.

    That said, the people of CA are destructive, but not stupid – such an Initiative will almost certainly go down to defeat (the idiots in this state need that safety blanket to protect themselves from their own insane politics), which is why an Initiative allowing majority budgeting has basically never been put on the ballot before (and likely never will).

  • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

    If our country ends up down the socialist rat hole, Republican circular firing squads at critical junctures will play a big role in the history books (if any are written, but that’s another story – hello Orwell).

    I assume that you’re talking about “agency fees” for those who opt-out of union membership. And I assume that without that compulsory payment, unions would lose most of their dues-paying base because of the well-recognized “free-rider” phenomenon – which I the “justification” that union leaders have given for agency fees.

    In terms of you “worst” categorization: I’m under the impression that California had the fig leaf that one could opt out of paying the portion of one’s union dues that is allocated towards political activities. Of course that’s a loophole big enough to drive a Teamsters truck through, but I thought some states don’t even allow that option. Or do you have to leave the union to avoid making political donations.

    The intermediate step would be forcing unions to disclose their income-expenses-balance sheets so that people could audit them, but the CA Republicans couldn’t even negotiate that in the budget.

    What advocacy group with deep-enough pockets is going to want to take on the unions as you suggest rather than just move to another state?

    This is not good news for the Republican party’s effort to stave off extinction: between New England and California, that’s a big handicap to start with

  • Achance

    membership or participation in the “social, fraternal, and political” activities of the union. Trouble is, in Blue states and even most of the time in Red states, nobody is going to enforce it. So, the employee is left to fend for himself sometimes with the help of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund, the Evergreen Foundation, or some other such group. Evergreen spearheaded the attack on the Washington State NEA which could only show that 17% of its dues money expenditures were actually going to collective bargaining expenses that could be charged to dues objectors. If you want some perverse reasoning, read the Democrat WA SC’s tortured turning of the 1st Am on its head to hold in favor of the union. The USSC overturned it, but nothing much has changed and WA is firmly in the control of Democrats and public employee unions and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

    The unions that bargain in the private sector are required to file reports, but they don’t under Democrats or file reports that could win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. GWB tried to ramp up enforcement and disclosure and when the Ds had the Senate early on, they put in budget language prohibiting him from expending anything on enforcing. The pure public employee unions are nothing more than state chartered non-profit corporations subject to almost no reporting, disclosure, or regulation – by or in any state.

  • indym

    There has been a lot of schwartzenegger bashing because of the budget issue. The legislature is voted on by the people who favor dems who are nothing more than panhandlers. California is facing an even worse budgetary crisis unless there is serious reform.