California budgetin'

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Sacramento Bee has the good news:

The California Legislature voted early today to approve a massive budget package of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to close a $40 billion deficit after granting major concessions to one holdout Republican senator.

Some things to consider:

1) The budget -- or, rather, passing it -- is a huge victory for Gov. Schwarzenegger and the Democrats. It pulls the state, and one of the world's largest economies, back from the brink of disaster.

2) The deal required that that "holdout Republican," Sen. Abel Maldonado, get a lot of what he wanted, including the elimination of "the 12-cent additional gas tax, which was estimated to bring in $2.1 billion through June 2010," which, while partially offset by a state income tax rate hike, would have gone a long way towards helping the state get through what is expected to be a difficult year ahead. (Such a disincentive to buy and use gas also would have been good for the environment.)

3) The problem in California is that budgets require two-thirds supermajority legislative support, meaning that the minority party -- in this case, the Republicans -- can often block passage indefinitely, as long as it has one-third-plus-one support. Which is what they were trying to do here, the party united enough that it took a pretty sweet deal for one of them for the majority Democrats to have enough votes to pass the budget.

And let's be clear about this: The overwhelming majority of Republicans oppose the budget.

As the Bee puts it: "The deal comes at a time when California was headed for fiscal calamity, already unable to pay all its bills and on the precipice today of suspending 374 construction projects that were valued at $5.58 billion and could have affected more than 90,000 jobs statewide." Which is to say, the Republicans oppose a budget that will prevent "fiscal calamity," that will keep construction projects going, and that will save tens and tens of thousands of jobs.

Once again, as federally, the Republican Party has positioned itself as the party of ideological extremism at a time of historic economic crisis, at a time when the American people, including the people of California, need help just to stay afloat. It isn't just the do-nothing party, which would be bad enough, it's the party against the people, the party so far divorced from reality, and decency, that it would rather stick to its anti-tax guns than rescue the state from impending disaster, that would rather promote its partisan political interests than protect jobs.

The economic crisis, which has shaped the debate over the stimulus package in Washington, the debate over the state budget in Sacramento, and other such debates all over the country, has provided us with the opportunity to peer directly into the soul of the Republican Party.

And what an ugly sight it is.