Don’t waste our time

If anybody wonders why California’s Legislature seems perennially incapable of solving the state’s budget problems, fixing its disastrous prison system or improving its benighted schools, consider the strange case of the Denham recall.

On Wednesday, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) announced that he was dropping a campaign to recall Sen. Jeff Denham (R-Atwater) in the June 3 election. Perata was mad because Denham, whose Central Valley district stretches from Watsonville to Modesto, voted against the proposed state budget last year. Of course, so did all the other Republicans in the Senate but one, causing an embarrassing 53-day delay in approving the spending plan. Yet Denham was more vulnerable than most because Democrats easily outnumber Republicans in his district. Moreover, if Denham had been replaced with a Democrat, it would have given Perata’s party a 26-14 advantage in the Senate -- one vote shy of the two-thirds majority needed to pass a budget with zero Republican support.

Perata says he dropped the bid, which he was bankrolling, because it was creating roadblocks to an agreement on this year’s budget. Maybe so, or maybe he just concluded that voters weren’t going to back the recall; Perata’s credibility is a little strained, especially because just last week he was rejecting claims that he was the driving force behind the campaign. “I didn’t sign the 61,000 petitions” to qualify it for the ballot, he told the Associated Press. “People in that district did. ... You can never go in and foment something like this.” And yet, with a wave of his hand, Perata the innocent bystander has seemingly made the whole thing go away.

Gray Davis, a Democrat, was the first California governor to be successfully recalled. At the time, his Democratic supporters argued that the campaign against him was an abuse of the recall process, which was intended to be used only against officeholders guilty of crimes or other serious malfeasance (which Davis wasn’t). Yet that didn’t stop Democrats from targeting Denham even though he was guilty of nothing more than siding with his party during the budget stalemate.

Denham and his GOP backers, meanwhile, sounded just as aggrieved as Davis did in 2003, calling the recall a purely political maneuver by Democrats. Yet Denham contributed $17,000 to the campaign to recall Davis. Where were his principles then?

The success of Davis’ political assassination now threatens to set off a tit-for-tat feud in which lawmakers from both parties turn to the recall process to settle political scores, foisting costly elections on the public and worsening the partisan gridlock in Sacramento. With a $20-billion budget hole to be plugged, we can suggest some better uses of their time and energy.