Lame-Duck Lawmaker Lectures Assembly on Deadlock : Budget: Legislator who failed to win renomination warns that they will be out of jobs too if they cannot break the stalemate.

Democratic Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd of Carson, an irascible, 12-year veteran of the Legislature who lost a bid for renomination in June, warned fellow lawmakers Saturday that they risk defeat in November if they cannot break the deadlock on the budget.

Floyd’s lecture came after the Assembly dissolved into virtual chaos while trying to decide how much money to take from each level of local government to help balance the budget. Faced with five conflicting sets of amendments to the local government bill, the Assembly was frozen. No plan could get a majority.

With tax increases having been ruled out, the budget can only be balanced by making cuts. And Floyd warned that unless lawmakers started making those cuts the Legislature will be debating the budget at Christmas. But by then, he said, a lot of the current members will have been defeated at the polls.

Here is a partial text of Floyd’s speech:

“You can’t save everybody you love. There’s only so many seats in the lifeboat. And you keep throwing somebody else into the lifeboat. But I’ve got to tell you, there’s going to be some drowning taking place.

“I know when you go home you’re going to sit down with your little city councilman and one group and another and the supervisors and say: ‘Boy, I saved you. But as I saved you, the whole damn ship went down.’ So guess what? You’re going to have a whole bunch of people sitting around one scraggly little tree on a desert island somewhere and you’re going to have voters saying you didn’t save anything. You sunk the ship.

“So you keep taking care of this little group or that little group or this close friend or brother-in-law. But this is getting down to real silliness.

“I think everybody with the amendments ought to get in a room and try and figure out how many people you can fit in a boat. It ain’t going to be a big enough boat. But you’re standing here and I’m looking forward (to having) a Halloween party in these chambers and then we’ll have Thanksgiving dinner and a whole lot of you are going to be in the same boat I’m in at that time. It ain’t going to really matter what you get in your Christmas stocking.”

After Floyd’s address, the Democrats went into a closed-door caucus. They emerged an hour later, reversed an earlier vote, and adopted amendments offered by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.