State Senate fails to pass budget

State senators went home Saturday morning after an all-night lockdown failed to force a budget agreement, with the exasperated Senate leader ordering GOP members to return midweek with their own spending plan.

The senators read books and magazines, listened to music and mostly just sat around through the previous night. Some of the Republicans posted notes ridiculing the lockdown to a conservative blog that has become a rallying point. By midmorning everyone was dismissed with no deal in place, pushing the budget impasse into a fourth week.

“We’ve reached the end of our rope,” said Senate Leader Don Perata (D-Oakland). “I do not understand what they are after.... If those 15 Republicans want to stop state government, they are on their way to doing it.”

The Senate Republicans continue to ignore Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s call to sign off on the $145-billion bipartisan budget approved Friday by the Assembly. The GOP lawmakers say that budget plan spends too much. But they have been unclear about where they would make about $700 million in additional spending reductions they demand.

Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman of Irvine said his caucus will meet Perata’s challenge to put it all in a GOP budget plan this week. The upper house will reconvene Wednesday.

“We are going to try to fashion a budget,” he said. “We will have a proposal.”

Ackerman said his caucus will not sign off on a budget package resembling the one passed with support of Republicans in the Assembly. The lower house has since adjourned for a month, with its leaders vowing not to cut recess short to consider changes to the spending bill. Ackerman called on the Assembly to return.

As drowsy senators left the Capitol on Saturday, pressure on Republicans mounted. The governor warned that cutting as deeply into spending as the Republicans are demanding would mean scaling back funding to schools, something Schwarzenegger said he will not support.

“I remain firm in my commitment that we not cut education funding,” he said.

The governor had earlier promised to use his line-item veto authority once the budget is passed to make some additional cuts that would appease the GOP. But the Republican senators say they are unconvinced that such a move would reduce spending enough.

Administration officials said that they were trying to help negotiate a deal but that Republicans had been unclear about what additional cuts they wanted to make, leaving discussions in limbo.

Individual Republicans, meanwhile, rebuffed invitations to meet with the governor late Friday night. In years past governors have occasionally managed to extract GOP votes for a budget from an otherwise obstinate caucus. Passage of a spending plan in the Senate requires at least two GOP votes. This year, the Senate GOP caucus has made a pact that none of its members will vote for a budget until the caucus as a whole agrees it would be appropriate.

One member appears to be wavering, however. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria), a moderate, has been abstaining from casting a budget vote, rather than joining his colleagues in voting against the Assembly plan.

As the rest of the Republicans dig in, school groups have begun calling individual lawmakers, urging them to compromise. The Democrats have already agreed to hundreds of millions of dollars in reductions to public transportation, welfare, drug treatment and other programs. Education spending accounts for nearly half of the budget, and educators warn that any further cuts will hit schools.

Education groups also warn that unless a budget is in place soon, schools won’t receive state money they need for the fall semester.

The effort to block the budget “creates confusion and concern for our school districts, which will be starting fall term in just a few weeks,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell.

Conservative activists, meanwhile, told the lawmakers to hold their ground.

“You 15 are officially martyrs for all California taxpayers,” Jon Fleischman, a member of the state party’s board, wrote to the caucus on his blog Flash Report, www.flashreport.org.GOP senators have been using the blog to sound off on Perata, the governor and Assembly Republican Leader Michael Villines of Clovis. They also offered updates on the lockdown.

Just before 7 a.m. Saturday, Sen. Jim Battin (R-La Quinta) sent in a posting. “We’ve been locked in, and there are sergeants at every exit making sure we can’t leave,” he wrote. “I slept in a chair for about an hour (and btw -- Dennis Hollingsworth [(R-Murrieta)] snores :/). Ah-Democracy at work.... It’s all rather quite embarrassing.”

Also posted on the blog was an attack on the governor by Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks): “He sided with liberal Democrats in refusing to balance the state budget.”

Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) blogged that if Assembly Republicans “had chosen to learn more from their colleagues in the Senate who have gone through more than one or two budgets, we might have a true ‘fiscally responsible’ budget to vote on.”

He also took a swipe at their decision to leave town: “Now is the time to put our vacation plans aside, get back to Sacramento and craft a better budget.”

evan.halper@latimes.com