Not-So-Sweet Odor of the Slush Fund : Ruling stemming from budget impasse opens door to abuse

What goes around comes around, and in Sacramento the evil era of governance by slush fund seems about to reappear in all its foul odor.

Senators, having been told by their Rules Committee that they will receive neither salary nor per diem expenses until a state budget is adopted, have innovatively won from the legislative counsel’s office an opinion that frees them from the temporary burden of financial worry. That opinion holds that it’s legal for senators to borrow from their campaign chests to make up for the state checks they are being denied.

Ah, but who regularly slips big bucks into those chests? Well, of course, it’s organizations eager to be assured of a sympathetic hearing--and sometimes much more--from the legislators: groups representing, among others, doctors, lawyers, insurers, gun owners, major agricultural interests and, of course, the ever-flush tobacco industry.

You say you’re a little short before the next payday? Allow us to help out. It’s not quite that crude, of course, but it’s close enough.

Senators are supposed to replace what they withdraw from their campaign funds once their $109-a-day per diem is retroactively paid. Until that happy day, though, there’s nothing standing in the way of friendly contributors keeping the campaign chest filled. Instead of living off public money, the senators who take advantage of the legislative counsel’s opinion will be meeting their daily expenses with special-interest private money.

Money is money, they argue, and besides, by tapping campaign funds they are only borrowing from themselves. Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier) says, in effect, that it will be repaid so it’s no big deal. But ethics are also ethics, and the elementary rights and wrongs of depending on the favors of campaign contributors for routine living expenses ought to be obvious.

Bill Lockyer, the Senate’s president pro tempore, who also chairs the Rules Committee, says he for one will live off his personal savings until the budget is adopted. It was Lockyer who led the committee’s action to suspend paying senators pending a budget agreement.

The Hayward Democrat’s quite reasonable argument is that the senators have an obligation to endure a little hardship when, in no small part because of the legislators’ own failures, others who make far less money than they do are being compelled to make financial sacrifices.

California’s legislators, for the record, are the highest paid in the nation: $72,000 a year--to rise to $75,600 in December--plus per diem for every day the Legislature is in session. They also get a state-supplied car and a state-supplied gasoline credit card. In addition many enjoy sometimes considerable outside income.

The key point, though, is this. The delayed state budget--it was supposed to be enacted almost two weeks ago--is once again the consequence of the inability of the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson to agree on how much should be spent for what. Our elected officials, in other words, didn’t do the job they were hired to do. Now some of them, whining that they can’t make ends meet because of the mess they helped to create, want to use money from special interests to pay for their daily bread and the jam they put on it. Worse, they seem blind to the ethical implications of what they are doing.