Democrats Dust Off Vetoed Bills as Session Starts

On their first day of a new legislative session, Democratic lawmakers resumed a fight with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Monday by introducing a package of prescription drug bills he vetoed last year.

They won’t be the last bills revived in the coming year, Democratic leaders vowed.

“We’re not looking to counter” Schwarzenegger, said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles). “We’re simply looking to define an agenda that makes it clear who we are and what we stand for.... What we’re looking for really are middle-class issues.”

Democrats in the Assembly unveiled eight bills that they called “a bold prescription” to runaway drug costs. The bills aim to:

* Save the state money on drug purchases for prison inmates in its care;

* Link all consumers to sources of cheaper prescription drugs in other countries;

* Give poor people a discount on prescriptions;

* Force drug makers to supply the state with safety data so California officials can pull drugs off shelves in the event they are ineffective or dangerous.

Last year, Schwarzenegger vetoed several versions of those bills, saying they would have violated federal laws that make it illegal to import prescription drugs.

As an alternative to the Democratic legislation, Schwarzenegger’s administration floated a plan to negotiate voluntary price breaks with drug makers and give discounts on prescriptions to 4.5 million Californians.

No more details on that plan have been forthcoming, however, and Democratic lawmakers said they will go to the ballot if necessary to try to bring down drug costs.

Democrats -- who dominate both houses of the Legislature -- are persisting on other fronts, despite Schwarzenegger’s previous vetoes.

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) has already introduced a bill to raise the state minimum wage -- now $6.75 an hour -- by an unspecified amount. And Nunez said “the jury is still out” on whether large employers should be required to pay part of their workers’ health insurance costs, even though voters rejected such a requirement in November at the governor’s urging.

“We’re going to come back with something else,” Nunez said.

Assembly Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) called the Democratic legislation “old, failed ideas.”

He said that by reintroducing bills that have already been vetoed before the governor spells out his agenda in an annual State of the State speech Wednesday, Democrats “show that they’re more interested in fighting the governor than in working with the governor to find a solution.”

In the state Senate, legislators also moved quickly to monitor Schwarzenegger’s massive overhaul of state government, called the California Performance Review.

Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont), chairwoman of a new Senate panel called the Government Modernization, Efficiency and Accountability Committee, said her job would be to gauge the performance of Schwarzenegger’s agencies, in such things as enforcing California’s environmental laws and catching fraud.

She urged the governor not to “propose phony reform and try to sell it to us as real reform.”

“Phony reform just moves problems around from one department to another bigger department, from an old board to a new bureau with a pretty new name and fancy new stationery,” Figueroa said.

“Real reform gets its hands dirty.”