GOP Budget Sellout Coming?

John Seiler:

The June 15 budget deadline is approaching fast. This year, legislators’ pay will be docked if they don’t make the deadline.

So it looks like the Kabuki dance is starting in earnest in the Capitol to get four Republican legislators, two in each house, to sell out their constituents and vote for tax increases. My reading: We’ll probably get a “temporary” extension of disgraced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2009 tax increases until the end of the year; plus a November election to get Gov. Jerry Brown’s five-year extension.

The Bee reports today:

“We are on the verge, if we execute during the next three weeks, to put this fiscal crisis behind us,” [Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell] Steinberg told about 75 people Wednesday afternoon at a fundraiser for his 2018 lieutenant governor account. “Let’s do this right and put it behind us.”…

Brown, Steinberg, Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez and a handful of Republicans have been meeting multiple times a day to agree on details about pension changes, a spending cap and regulatory reform.

“I don’t think there are significant sticking points in negotiations,” Steinberg said. “Now, it’s a matter of drafting, finishing negotiations and execution.”

Steinberg hopes to bring a final budget package to a floor vote as early as June 8.

He called the spending cap “a more robust rainy day fund” that would use extra revenues to pay off the state’s debt.

So, there will be some kind of a fake budget limit to use as a fig leaf for GOP sellouts.

Steinberg’s political philosophy is: Government of the government unions, by the government unions, for the government unions.

And note that he’s running for lieutenant governor in 2012, a pointless job that shouldn’t even exist. That would be the stepping stone to running for governor in 2016.

Looks like the fix is in.