Time for gov., legislators to get in step on budget

Legislators are 16 days past the deadline for passing a budget and they haven’t even done the “Dance of Death.”

That’s the annual summer ritual where one budget scheme after another is ceremoniously sacrificed until there’s agreement on a single survivor.

A senior legislative staffer long ago described the Dance of Death to me this way: “Everybody dances around the fire. They throw stuff at us. We throw stuff at them. Everybody falls over dead, and we start all over again.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the past, has had his own name for the little skit. “It’s all part of the Kabuki,” he says.

“Everyone is beating on their chest and saying, ‘We are the stronger ones. We’re going to stick to our policies and to our way of doing things.’ And then eventually you go and resolve some of those differences.”

More commonly in the Capitol, this sort of dancing is called “a drill.”

In a drill, the Legislature’s majority party -- virtually always the Democrats -- forces a floor vote on a bill even if there isn’t enough minority support for passage.

The purpose is to exhibit the GOP as a stubborn, insensitive obstructionist that would -- quoting Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) last week -- “take canes away from the blind and kick wheelchairs out from under the disabled.”

Republicans, however, also can tar the Democrats as leftist spending addicts.

They throw stuff at us. We throw stuff at them.... We start all over again.

Fortunately for the dancers, not many people watch.

Democrats are preparing for the summer’s first dance performance any day now because there’s a lot of internal pressure: Lawmakers are antsy to get out of town for a four-week recess slated to begin Friday, but only if the budget has been passed. A conference committee version is ready for floor action in both houses.

Legislative leaders had wanted to avoid the death dance with its rigid posturing and positioning, hoping to all get along as they did last year. Forget it. This is a two-party political system.

What Schwarzenegger calls “post-partisanship” doesn’t make sense in English or in practice. Political partisanship never will be eradicated in America, nor should it be. But there always will be periods of bipartisanship and areas of nonpartisanship.

This budget dance is mostly about partisanship and ideology -- but not a lot of dollars, relatively.

In a budget proposal of roughly $146 billion, the dispute is over $2 billion. This is the projected amount the state would spend over what it takes in during the fiscal year that began July 1, when the budget was due.

That “operating deficit” would be covered by a previous-year, carry-over surplus of about $4 billion, a cushion made possible by massive borrowing during Schwarzenegger’s first year in office, 2004. The state deficit, however, is projected to grow to at least $6 billion in the next fiscal year, 2008-09.

“We basically want to get the budget as close to balancing as we can,” says Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman of Irvine. “We’re trying to slow down the growth of government. It keeps going up and up. A lot of this stuff is on autopilot.”

Fine, how does the budget get balanced? Republicans won’t say publicly. They’ve privately given Democratic leaders a list of possible “savings” totaling $2 billion, but won’t share it with the public -- probably realizing they’d be instantly attacked.

The GOP has suggested balancing the budget by taking money from education, transit, and the elderly poor, blind and disabled, according to staffers who don’t want to be identified as leakers.

“The Republicans are far to the right of the governor,” Nunez says. “And they’re asking us to walk down the conservative road with them. We just can’t do it. We’re not going to be right-wing nuts.”

Democratic leaders have spurned Schwarzenegger’s proposals to knock 155,000 children off the welfare rolls, freeze benefits for the elderly poor and disabled, and cut $55 million in services for the homeless mentally ill. They also rejected $750 million of the governor’s proposed $1.3-billion cut in transit funding, accepting $550 million.

“There are very few things we can cut,” insists Senate leader Don Perata (D-Oakland). “We could be here a very long time.”

Then the public would begin to notice, even if it does yawn through the dance ritual. That undoubtedly would hurt the legislators’ efforts to sell the voters on altering term limits. A measure is expected to be on the February ballot.

So why can’t these people get their work done on time? (Last year was a rare exception.) Who’s the culprit?

It’s not the Democrats. They haven’t even proposed a tax increase, much to the GOP’s chagrin.

It’s not really the Republicans. They’re just representing their voters who believe, logically, that the state shouldn’t be running on red ink.

It’s also not the governor, even if he has been largely absent from the Capitol. Legislators seem to negotiate better without him anyway.

Schwarzenegger is at fault, however, for having cut the car tax as his first major act without replacing the $5 billion in lost revenue by, say, extending the sales tax to services. He never has climbed out of that hole.

But the biggest culprit is California’s insane requirement of a two-thirds majority vote in each house for passage of a budget, or practically anything involving money. It’s a system structured for stalemate. Only two other states, Rhode Island and Arkansas, require a supermajority vote for a budget.

In Sacramento, it means that Democrats -- although they represent the California majority -- can’t pass a state budget without GOP approval. That’s hardly what the Founders had in mind for annual money appropriations.

“This is the only time Republicans get to be on center stage,” Perata says.

They’ll be out there with Democrats this week doing the Dance of Death. Everybody needs to get that out of their system -- and hope they don’t look too foolish.

george.skelton@latimes.com