The Sacramento Bee: Lawmakers send Jerry Brown incomplete budget

Capitol Alert
By David Siders and Jeremy B. White
dsiders@sacbee.com
June 15, 2015

• Vote meets deadline, ensuring lawmakers continue to be paid
• Spending plan comes despite ongoing negotiations with governor
• Republican lawmaker: ‘It’s the legislative paycheck protection act’

The budget California state lawmakers passed Monday did not reflect a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown and, for that reason, has almost no hope of being enacted.

Negotiations are ongoing.

Yet if pausing for a vote did nothing to advance fiscal policy in California, the timing mattered greatly to the 120 legislators involved.

By passing the spending bill – unfinished though it was – the Legislature met a June 15 deadline to pass a budget or give up their pay.

“It’s not a budget bill,” said Melissa Melendez, a Lake Elsinore assemblywoman who joined minority Republicans in opposition to the plan. “It’s the legislative paycheck-protection act.”

The budget includes about $749 million more in spending than Brown proposed, and majority Democrats acknowledged they will have to revisit portions of the plan.

“Is this going to be our final budget?” asked Kevin de León, the Senate president pro tem. “Unlikely.”

Yet in passing a budget, de León said the Senate was “fulfilling our constitutional obligation to our constituents and to the state of California.”

On party-line votes with Republicans opposed, the spending plan cleared the Assembly 53-27 and the Senate 26-13. Lawmakers finished by early afternoon, hours ahead of the midnight budget deadline.

When Californians approved Proposition 25 in 2010, they gave the Legislature the authority to pass budgets on a majority vote rather than two-thirds. They also required lawmakers to surrender their pay for every day they failed to meet the June 15 budget deadline.

But a budget’s passage and its enactment are different things. Including Monday, lawmakers in three of the last four years have passed a budget intending to follow up with legislation reflecting subsequent agreements with the governor.

“We stand by the budget we’ve just approved,” said Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. “We know he’s got some reactions to some of that, but we’re doing it in discussion together. Would we like what we just passed? Absolutely, 100 percent. But we’re realistic about it.”

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