When Will We Get a Budget, Pray Tell?

There will be a state budget soon, God willing.

The Assembly’s chaplain, Hamilton T. Boswell, who offers a prayer before each session, has lately been seeking special guidance for the lower house, now 18 days late in passing a budget for this fiscal year. The legislators are due back in session Thursday.

As the budget impasse has stretched from days into weeks, Boswell’s prayers, often delivered to a nearly empty chamber, have been sounding more like hard-bitten political analysis than supplication.

The change in tone has not gone unnoticed.

“We’re going to have to get Rev. Boswell to register as a lobbyist,” quipped Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles). “He’s jumping right into the process. We need divine intervention, and the reverend apparently has noticed that.”

Boswell, a retired Methodist minister from San Francisco, started turning up the heat shortly after Independence Day, when he implored the heavens to help the Assembly renew its vision of “democracy in the flesh,” which he described as “more than words or holiday parades.”

On Monday, Boswell said the deadlocked Assembly seemed to be “in the valley of no decision and at our wits’ end.” Then on Tuesday, Boswell said the politicians in their “unenlightened pride” had come to the “eternal spirit” for help.

“Amid the fear and confusion of the gravity of the problem at hand, we have been halting between the many opinions,” Boswell said, “and our progress has been slow and spare.”

In an interview, Boswell acknowledged that his recent remarks have been directed as much at the members as at the Lord. But he said he felt free to offer his advice and to comment as long as he refrained from partisanship.

“I don’t know if what I do affects anyone,” said Boswell, a portly man with a soothing voice. “I’m aware that many people here are not religious at all. But I don’t need numbers. If it affects one or two then it is worth it.” Boswell predicted that the budget deadlock would “break very soon” because the “wrath of the people” is building.