GOP holdouts on state budget cite principles

SACRAMENTO -- When state Sen. Bob Margett walks among the manufacturers and dairy farmers of his conservative district, he says, “it’s all attaboys” for his part in the seven-week budget stalemate that has paralyzed much of state government.

“ ‘Bob, . . . thank God for the Senate,’ ” the Arcadia lawmaker recalled hearing time and again. “I’m getting all these attaboys to hang in there, and that’s my constituency. I don’t have a single vote in San Francisco.”

Nor is he beholden to voters in other largely Democratic urban areas. Margett and 13 GOP colleagues in the Senate represent a minority of Californians, mostly in rural towns, yet by banding together to withhold the one vote still needed, they have stretched the budget deadlock to 48 days.

Outnumbered by Democrats, they have spent careers watching the promulgation of social and fiscal policies they abhor -- on matters from abortion to the environment -- while legislation they hold dear is relegated to the recycling bin. Because the budget is among the few types of legislation that can’t pass without minority support, the annual spending battle allows them a rare chance to exercise influence.

For instance, state Sen. Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield, a slim, salt-and-pepper-haired man who represents growers in the Central Valley, has some demands. One of them is a bill to curb the power of Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, to file lawsuits that could hold up proposals from last year’s $40-billion infrastructure bond act on the grounds that they could worsen global warming.

“If we don’t keep faith with the public and build these bridges and roads and highways and fix the water system and build these schools like we told the public we were going to do -- if instead we squander that away in lawsuits -- that is just wrong, and I’m not going to be a part of it,” said Ashburn, 53, in an interview last week.

A proud conservative who lost a congressional bid three years ago, Ashburn made a name for himself as a Kern County supervisor fighting to remove a desert squirrel from the state’s endangered species list because limitations on property owners in the squirrel’s name were “terrorizing” his constituents.

Ashburn remained unswayed on the budget when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow Republican who has moved to the political center, promised to veto $700 million in spending if the senators would go along. Ashburn called $150 million of Schwarzenegger’s proposed cuts “phony” and “an accounting gimmick.”

Schwarzenegger spokesman Adam Mendelsohn said all the proposals were “real spending reductions.” In any case, the governor’s cuts didn’t match the senator’s priorities.

“It didn’t have welfare recipients get a job, become self-reliant and go off the rolls at five years. That’s $350 million that could have been included,” Ashburn said. “It continues a lower tuition for illegal immigrants in our community colleges in California. That’s wrong.”

The Assembly passed a budget backed by Schwarzenegger on July 20 -- nearly three weeks past the deadline -- that reduced transportation funding by $1.3 billion, delayed welfare increases and slashed drug treatment for prisoners. Lawmakers return to the Capitol from summer break Monday.

Earlier this month, a Sierra Club environmentalist derided the Senate’s Republican holdouts as “a gang of 14 privileged. . . white men” obstructing funding for healthcare, schools and parks. Sen. Jim Battin, 45, a wry, easygoing Republican from La Quinta whose father was a congressman and federal judge in Montana, took offense.

“They’re just very loud and angry,” Battin said of “liberals,” adding that mockery would not deter his caucus.

He said Democrats created the problem themselves with a 2001 redistricting that polarized the Legislature by making most districts safe for incumbents.

But “at one point, everyone’s going to realize that we are serious about this and we’re not going to change,” he said. “Then we’ll be happy to sit down and negotiate with them.”

The Senate Republicans are so tight-knit that they agreed no one would support the budget unless a majority of the 15-member caucus agreed. Only one, Sen. Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria, who represents one of the state’s few tightly contested districts and is seeking reelection, defected and voted for the budget. “I got elected to represent the 15th senatorial district,” he said, “not to represent the Republican senatorial caucus.”

Margett represents parts of Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties. The 78-year-old retired contractor and father of seven is a devout Catholic with a relaxed, grandfatherly air. He said he tries to live by a moral code, and suggested that Maldonado could pay a price for violating their “gentleman’s agreement.”

“Why would somebody abandon a deal, a handshake, a commitment that was made?” Margett said. “Is he going to be admonished? Is he going to be reprimanded? Is he going to be kicked out? Is he not going to get any money for his reelection? There’s a lot of things that could happen.”

The senators said their concerns this year for legislation benefiting, for example, railroad companies, the timber industry and agriculture -- and against trial lawyers -- are natural given their backgrounds and constituents. By the same token, they oppose a plan to give Los Angeles $150 million out of $250 million allocated for traffic-light synchronization.

“We have to make sure that it’s fairly distributed throughout the state,” said state Sen. Dave Cogdill of Modesto, who is vying to be the next GOP Senate leader. “We don’t want to see it go to the city of Los Angeles or the Bay Area.”

This week, after Schwarzenegger campaigned at a health clinic in Cogdill’s district that has been cut off from state aid, the senator said the governor should “engage in more constructive dialogue” instead of using service agencies as “pawns.” Mendelsohn said they were not pawns, but “people whose lives were being impacted by the budget.”

To the south is state Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth’s home base, Murrieta. Hollingsworth, 40, was born and raised on a dairy farm in Riverside County, in a town of 6,000 people. He once worked selling frozen bull semen to dairymen, and later took a job for a farmers’ and ranchers’ association. He campaigned to have the Stephens’ kangaroo rat removed from the state endangered species list because he said it was interfering with the agricultural economy.

In the Legislature, he has championed property rights and taxpayers’ interests. He decried “pork barrel earmarks” such as the traffic signals directed at Democratic areas in the spending plan passed by the Assembly.

But mostly, he doesn’t want California to spend more money than it takes in every year. “We think this is the year to have a balanced budget,” said Hollingsworth, state chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national group that favors free markets and limited government.

Hollingsworth has advocated some spending, though. He has pushed for $6.5 million last year and $4.2 million this year to eradicate the Diaprepes root weevil, an insect infecting ornamental, native and commercial plants in his county and two others in Southern California.

“If we don’t spend $4 million to eradicate the root weevil, we’ll be spending tens, if not hundreds of millions, after it’s a full-blown infestation,” Hollingsworth argued.

Even after the budget battle ends, it could have a lingering effect. Bill Whalen, a researcher at the Hoover Institution, a Republican-leaning think tank, said the fight could presage an effort by conservatives to move the state party farther to the right after the moderate Schwarzenegger leaves office.

Margett, who was home in Arcadia nearing the end of Leo Tolstoy’s 800-page novel “Anna Karenina” as the stalemate wore on this week, said the governor’s move to the middle had alienated the senators from him politically.

“He could, other than on fiscal issues, be a very good Democrat,” Margett said. “It’s not that we don’t like the governor. He’s a hell of a guy. He’s great to have at a cocktail party.”

Lawmakers will almost certainly pass a budget eventually, but Margett is unlikely to vote for it. During six years in the Assembly and two in the Senate, he never has voted for one.

“We’ve been in a financial jam for years,” he said. “We haven’t run this state like a good corporation would be run.”

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michael.rothfeld@latimes.com