Lone wolf dares to defy GOP pack over budget

Sacramento

In a summer when California legislators seem lost, at least one clearly knows where he’s going.

Amid budget nonsense, he has shown common sense.

While his Senate Republican colleagues have cowered under the shadow of right-wing ideology, he has had the courage to move forward on a centrist course of compromise.

Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria), 39, is the kind of lawmaker ordinary people say they want representing them: Not too politically partisan. Not afraid to exercise independence. More loyal to his constituents than his party caucus.

He’s also smart and likable -- perpetually upbeat about living the California dream. He once described to me the thrill of taking the oath as a state assemblyman after being elected in 1998:

“I was overwhelmed -- a young Hispanic from a family that once had nothing, there in the big state Capitol. My father was an immigrant bracero irrigator. . . . I gotta tell you, it was the best day of my life. We both had tears in our eyes. This is a man who has a sticker on his truck: ‘Broken English Spoken Perfectly.’ ”

That man who speaks broken English -- who still carries a green card -- now farms about 6,000 acres, which he either owns or leases. The family saved, bought a half acre, caught a real estate boom and leveraged the small plot into a big farming operation.

Abel Maldonado says his ambition was to be a pest control advisor, which -- he adds with a laugh -- “I figure would be good for the state Capitol.”

One day when he was young and naive, however, he walked into a local government office to obtain a building permit for a fruit and vegetable processing plant. “I thought I’d get first-class service, like we gave in our business,” he recalls. “I didn’t get it. It wasn’t right.”

So Maldonado ran for Santa Maria City Council and got elected. Later, he became mayor. He served three terms in the Assembly and was elected to the Senate in 2004, representing nearly 200 miles of the Central California coast, from northern Santa Barbara County to southern Santa Clara County.

The moderate ran for statewide office once -- being narrowly beaten in the 2006 GOP controller primary by conservative Tony Strickland -- and undoubtedly will run again, if he can survive the right-wing furor stirred up by his latest legislative vote and get reelected to the Senate next year.

If the Senate’s top Democrat -- President Pro Tem Don Perata of Oakland -- has anything to do with it, Maldonado will survive. “I’d be happy to go down to Santa Maria any time and knock on doors and say what a solid guy he is,” Perata says. “I just admire him. I was just blown away by what he did, by his courageous stand on principle.”

Maldonado committed the party sin of casting the only Republican vote in the Senate for a compromise state budget proposal that had been endorsed by Assembly Republicans and the Republican governor. But because of California’s inane, stalemate-creating requirement of a two-thirds majority vote for budget passage, the $146-billion budget still fell one vote short of being passed.

That was Aug. 1, one month after the budget was supposed to have been enacted. So some small businesses that sell goods and services to the state are being stiffed. Child-care programs are in danger of closing. Transportation projects are on hold.

And Senate Republicans still are flailing. They’re trying to trade their budget votes for -- among other things -- legislation to crimp Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown’s ability to sue local governments to force them into requiring fewer greenhouse gas emissions from new development projects.

Democrats will have none of it. And Brown couldn’t ask for a better break politically.

Here’s a guy who apparently wants to run for governor again in 2010 -- to take another stab at the job he performed with limited success three decades ago -- and suddenly he’s back in the spotlight with an environmental cause certain to win him a Democratic cheering section.

“He’s the best politician in the state in terms of moving the media and public opinion,” Perata says. “It’s like putting a bat in the hands of Barry Bonds. He’ll hit the hell out of it.”

Meanwhile, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles), who sent his house members on a one-month vacation after they passed the budget July 20, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday with a dire warning for Senate Republicans: Better accept what’s on the table, because any new offer would be worse for GOP conservatives.

If the Assembly is forced into renegotiating, Nuñez vowed, a new deal wouldn’t include a $123-million, five-month delay in cost-of-living benefit boosts for 1.2 million impoverished aged, blind and disabled. Also, a “substantial portion” of the proposed $1.3 billion in reduced transit funds would be restored.

Maldonado says he figured that: “What did Kenny Rogers say, ‘You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when to walk away.’

“Walk away and wave the checkered flag.”

Senate Republicans either don’t know when to declare victory because they’re so used to losing. Or they’re just hankering to fight -- to prove their relevance and take a shot at the governor who last year virtually ignored them and dealt solely with ruling Democrats.

It’s both, I suspect.

Make no mistake: The Assembly-passed budget is a Republican budget. It hits society’s most vulnerable. It cuts funds for inner-city transit. It reduces the budget deficit to $700 million -- half of what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had proposed in May -- and the governor has promised to whittle that down to zero with line-item vetoes. The budget sets aside a record $3.6-billion reserve. And there’s no tax increase.

That’s basically what Republicans have demanded for months. They’ve won. But in the Senate, Maldonado is the only one trying to wave the flag -- before Democrats turn around and run them over.

george.skelton@latimes.com