What’s happening on the state budget this week — or, more accurately, not happening — is the latest chapter in a 15-year-long saga of manipulative Capitol politics.
Sometime before Saturday night, the Legislature will pass what its leaders will claim is a state budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year that begins on July 1. Saturday is the June 15 constitutional deadline, and if legislators don’t comply with it, they theoretically could forfeit their paychecks.
However, the budget will only pay lip service to the California Constitution, and may bear only a passing resemblance to the budget that will finally emerge sometime later.
Understanding why this charade exists requires turning the clock back to 2009, when a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was sparring with Democratic legislative leaders over a budget that was hammered by the Great Recession and had been tied up in partisan wrangling for months.
Budgets then required two-thirds votes in the Legislature, which meant they needed support from at least a few GOP legislators. A Republican state senator, Abel Maldonado, refused to cast the decisive vote unless Democrats agreed to place a measure on the 2010 ballot that would overhaul California’s primary election system.
At the time, nominees were chosen via primaries within the parties. Maldonado, backed by Schwarzenegger, wanted to switch to a jungle primary system in which all candidates — regardless of party — would appear on the same primary ballot, and the top two vote-getters would qualify for a runoff.
Leaders of both parties hated the change, but Democrats finally caved and placed Proposition 14 on the ballot.
“Most Californians are neither far-left nor far-right, but in the middle,” Schwarzenegger said. “We will no longer punish candidates and elected officials for putting the people first, in front of partisan politics.”
He later made Maldonado lieutenant governor when the office became vacant.
Democrats seethed about being forced to accept the top-two primary to get a budget deal and vowed never to let it happen again. With labor union allies, they immediately qualified another ballot measure, Proposition 25, which lowered the vote requirement for budgets to a simple majority. The measure basically cut Republicans out of the budget process, and included a sweetener to attract voters, declaring that legislators’ salaries would be docked if they didn’t enact a budget by June 15.
Just a year later, that proviso was tested when Jerry Brown, who had returned to the governorship after a 28-year absence, vetoed the 2011-12 budget passed by the Legislature, saying “it continues big deficits for years to come and adds billions of dollars of new debt.”
Democratic state Controller John Chiang immediately blocked legislators’ paychecks, costing them about $400 a day. A couple of weeks later, a new budget was passed and signed by Brown and paychecks were issued.
However, the incident outraged legislative leaders, who sued Chiang and later won judicial a ruling that if the Legislature passed a budget by June 15, even if incomplete, they could keep their salaries.
That’s why legislators will pass a budget this week that is far from final, but the threat of losing their paychecks is only theoretical.
What is real is that Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders are at odds on some fairly significant aspects of the budget, particularly his proposed reductions in many state programs to help cover a $44.9 billion deficit. Legislators want to reduce prison spending and raise some taxes on business to rescind Newsom’s cuts.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.