Sacramento Shoving Match

After years of steady decline, policy-making in California government has skidded to a point at which it dishonors the proud history of a state that once was a pioneer in everything that it touched.

The Lungren affair of Thursday makes it abundantly clear why Sacramento dumped the really important issues onto the ballot this year, forcing voters to decide by referendum on matters ranging from insurance rates to highway funds. The governor and the Legislature want to devote their full attention to shoving each other around in between fund-raising affairs.

Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach) should be grateful for his narrow rejection by the state Senate as Gov. George Deukmejian’s nominee to fill the office of state treasurer. The office was left vacant by the death of Jesse M. Unruh last year.

Lungren should look on the incident as a narrow escape, not a narrow loss, and scramble back to his seat in the House of Representatives at his earliest opportunity. Congress may have its problems, but, compared with the bumblers who now make policy in Sacramento, it is an intellectual Taj Majal.

As an example of the kind of thinking that Lungren would have to put up with if he stayed in Sacramento, Deukmejian says that he probably won a vote of confidence from the Legislature and may take the matter to court. The Assembly narrowly approved Lungren’s nomination; the Senate turned it down by two votes. The governor apparently relies on a tortured reading of a subsidiary passage in the state Constitution that covers interim appointments. The passage is awkwardly worded, but not so awkwardly as to lead a reasonable court to doubt that the Legislature has said no to the Lungren nomination.

They tell a story in Sacramento about the early days of the governor’s first term when a delegation of legislators advised Deukmejian that compromise was possible if both were to bend their positions a little. “We are not running a flea market here,” the governor is said to have responded.

Even Republicans said that the governor’s aversion to the flea market cost him votes that would have given him victory in the Senate. A yes vote from Sen. Rose Ann Vuich (D-Dinuba), for example, might have been possible and would have turned the tide in the Senate, but the governor--who went into her district to campaign against her last year--apparently never asked for her vote.

For its part, the Legislature and its Democratic leadership began pawing through the files looking for good grounds to kill the Lungren nomination within hours after the governor’s nomination announcement. By our reckoning, they never found good grounds, but that did not slow them down.

Has Sacramento hit bottom? Not if you listen closely to Senate Minority Leader Ken Maddy (R-Fresno). In winding up debate in support of Lungren, he said that rejecting the nominee might well touch off a “battle royal” between the Legislature and the governor. Actually, they have nothing better to do than fight, having already fobbed the important decisions off onto the voters.