Tug of War in Sacramento

Welcome back to the wacky world of the California Legislature. The lawmakers had not been in session one full day before they throttled Gov. George Deukmejian’s pet plan for reorganizing the government agencies that deal with toxic waste.

Election-year politics! cried Republicans as Assembly Democrats ganged up on the reorganization plan. Obstructionists! cried the governor. And even the Democratic leader of the Senate, David Roberti of Los Angeles, questioned the strategy of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown of San Francisco. Better to attack the governor on substance than on style, Roberti mused.

Insiders said Roberti was irked that Brown planned to upstage the governor’s State of the State address Thursday with his own Democratic state of the state assessment without the benefit of Roberti’s input. But there is nothing new about rivalry between the Legislature’s two houses, even when they are controlled by the same party.

It would be tempting to jump to the conclusion that the Legislature is out of control even before the seats are warm for the 1986 session. But the rational, if trying, course is to have patience. The governor’s first toxics plan failed because it was flawed. The second one was pretty much doomed in the final hectic days of the 1985 session, the victim of complex political wrangling in which the governor was a participant.

Roberti has something of a point: Let the governor organize the bureaucracy the way he wants to, and then judge the results. But it is also understandable that Assembly Democrats did not want the governor to be able to claim all the credit for what is shaping up to be a major election issue.

None of this means that the governor cannot accept a Democratic-written plan from the Legislature, and even claim victory for himself, if it achieves the basic goals that he sought. Deukmejian wants a Cabinet-level position while one Democratic proposal is to put the toxics department under the existing environmental affairs secretary. Again, largely a matter of style.

The Assembly action on Monday may seem like petty politics. But this is a political system. Californians have seen fit to elect a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature. This makes the process more cumbersome, and sometimes inexplicable. The important thing now is for the Legislature to establish an effective program for attacking the toxic-waste problem. Sooner would be better than later.