Low Earth Orbit

Surely one reason to give thanks right now is that you need not spend any time in California’s statehouse, where the legislature has unveiled its not-so-Special Session of ugly personal behavior, nasty partisanship and utter failure to grasp the message from Republican and Democratic voters who elected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I was at the statehouse, however.

And I can report that Republicans in the state Assembly drew first blood, springing a surprise vote on the Democrats to dispense with the usual committee hearings and rules so they could immediately vote on whether to repeal Senate Bill 60, the illegal immigrant drivers’ license law.

Had the Republican leaders chatted with Democratic leaders about their desire to immediately vote Nov. 18 on the repeal (by means of a one-page bill that simply states SB60 is hereby repealed), the Republicans would have learned the Democrats had no intention of voting that day—-nor of suspending rules the Democrats suspend only for their own advantage.

No, the Democrats intended to send the one-page repeal bill to go to the Transportation Committee for debate, which would take days. And since Democrats control the majority in the Assembly, what they say goes.

The Republicans knew this would happen. But the Republicans had something else in mind, besides repeal of SB 60.

They had in mind embarrassing the Democrats in front of national and international media who were still in Sacramento following the governor’s Nov. 17 swearing-in. If the Democrats refused to expedite the vote to repeal SB 60, the Republicans could cry that Democrats are obstructionist lefties who have no intention of trying to help Gov. Schwarzenegger.

It doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with repealing SB 60. The Assembly Republicans failed to heed Schwarzenegger’s call to act differently. The Assembly Republicans are acting like hardcore partisans and quacking like hardcore partisans.

How did Assembly Democrats respond? The majority Democrats, not at all accustomed to being pushed around by the minority Republicans, came out with knives drawn.

Like the hardcore partisans they are, the Assembly Democrats drew blood right back. And they haven’t stopped yet.

The first day went like this (abridged, of course):

“What we are getting instead of action, action, action, is delay, delay, delay!” — Tony Strickland, Republican, Thousand Oaks.

“The people did not say throw away every bit of process!”— Darrell Steinberg, Democrat, Sacramento.

“Millions of people are disgusted by what they are seeing here tonight!” — Russ Bogh, Republican, Cherry Valley.

“We are doing what your governor … asked us to do—not come out and throw the punch!” — Sarah Reyes, Democrat, Fresno.

“I think the governor should be ashamed of what he sees here!” — Juan Vargas, Democrat, San Diego.

“That we need to have a bill, so simple, vetted in committee, is absolute hogwash!” — Dennis Mountjoy, Republican, Monrovia.

The Assembly met for only two hours the first week of the Special Session called by the new governor to make emergency fixes to the disastrous budget and ongoing workers compensation crisis. Of that, they spent 30 minutes insulting one another and 40 minutes adjourning in praise of various pals of theirs.

Forty minutes adjourning. A schoolteacher who came to observe was furious. “If I spent this much time commending my peers, I would be behind in my teaching for the semester,” she fume to me.

I doubt you heard much in the news about the 40 minutes adjourning. The walking dead California political media is doing their usual bang-up job sanitizing what really happens in Sacramento.

Yet at midnight Dec. 5—-the deadline by which Schwarzenegger must get approval for his $15 billion bond to refinance the state debt in order to put it on the March ballot—-watch the legislators whine “if only we had a few more hours.”

Democrats immediately went to work getting payback for how the Republicans embarrassed them over SB 60 that first day.

The nastiness started in a meeting Nov. 19 jammed with people wanting to hear from the new Department of Finance Director, Donna Arduin, a budget-cutting expert who Schwarzenegger stole from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Forget the cleansed and thus grossly inaccurate media reports. This is what went down: Arduin was asked to appear at 10:30 a.m. to present her audit and explain Schwarzenegger’s $15 billion plan to refinance $12 billion in debt at lower interest, plus a one-time $3.2 billion cost to cover the car tax he rescinded.

But Democrat Jenny Oropeza of Long Beach, chairing the hearing, double-booked Chief Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill to also explain the fiscal situation.

Hill went first. Arduin, who Oropeza and the committee well knew had to be at a noon meeting with the governor, was made to wait an hour and 15 minutes as Oropeza encouraged the committee to ask endless questions of Elizabeth Hill.

Arduin had put in a request to Oropeza that she be allowed to make her presentation in time for her meeting with Schwarzenegger. Oropeza refused. When Arduin was finally allowed to testify, she had 15 minutes left before seeing the governor.

Suffering from a nasty sinus infection, Arduin asked, into the microphone, if she could be seated while testifying. Oropeza refused to allow Arduin to sit down, using the lame excuse that all the members of the committee should see her face.

People couldn’t believe it. A murmur went through the room. Arduin seemed to hesitate. Was this for real? But Oropeza once again insisted Arduin stand up.

Partway through her testimony, Arduin pleaded for a chair. Two men jumped up to help her. Oropeza—-in the dripping, saccharine voice that makes her one of the most grating legislators—-exclaimed, “Of course sit down, of course, if you really need to!”

A joke spread through the reporters leaning along one wall: “Oropeza must have gone to the Cruz Bustamante School of Condescension.”

After explaining her audit, Arduin answered questions. The panel knew she had to leave. But noon—the time of her appointment with the governor—came and went as Arduin came in for tough questioning by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg of Los Angeles. Goldberg did not like the fact that Schwarzenegger says the $3.2 billion in car tax money he is refunding is an “accumulated debt” from the Davis Administration.

“It should never have been raised,” Arduin explained, of the tripling of the car tax. Arduin said Davis raised the tax once he and the legislature had knowingly chosen to spend a like amount of money, which the state did not have. Thus, the amount is an accumulated debt from Davis.

Dissatisfied, Goldberg pursued the issue. But Arduin ended her testimony and abruptly left, late to see the governor. Her testimony had been so short that TV crews chased Arduin down a hallway hungry for quotes, and one journalist smashed into Arduin in the crush, splashing a cup of water that Arduin was clutching all across Arduin’s dress front.

By my count, about five people owe Arduin an apology. But how did the media cover this? Newspapers breathlessly reported that Arduin abruptly left, leaving out much—-and sometimes all—-of the mistreatment by Oropeza.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, despite having a reporter present, did not tell its readers that Oropeza forced Arduin to stand, nor that Oropeza had refused Arduin’s request to testify in a timely manner. The Times buried, well into the story that made Arduin seem at fault, the fact that Oropeza had made Arduin cool her heels more than an hour. This appears to be another sad example of the state’s largest newspaper continuing its anti-Schwarzenegger and longtime pro-Democratic bias.

One 13-year veteran Republican staffer I spoke to could not recall any precedent in which a committee chair refused a cabinet member’s request to testify in time to make a pre-set meeting with a governor. A Democratic staffer agreed with this, telling me, “What you saw there was Jenny Oropeza playing to the Democrats, because on that day she was in the running to become the next Speaker of the Assembly.”

Oropeza was showing Democrats she could mistreat a high-ranking Republican after the Republicans embarrassed the Democrats over SB 60. But this backfired on Oropeza. Two days later—-partly as a backlash to her bullying Arduin—Oropeza lost the speakership fight to Fabian Nunez, a Los Angeles Democrat who, though far to the left, is notably less antagonistic toward Republicans.

In the Capitol Rotunda, I ran into Democrat Richard Katz, former senior advisor to Gray Davis, and asked him how his party should be behaving.

“Gov. Schwarzenegger needs to be successful, and the Democrats need to understand what happened in October rather than deny events,” he said. “They really need to face reality.”

Unfortunately for all of us, as the Special Session marched onward, the Democrats were so infected with partisan anger it became clear they weren’t snapping out of it.

Maltreatment of Arduin spread to the normally respectful Senate. There, Sen. Joe Dunn, a highly partisan Democrat from Santa Ana, in a rare attack on a cabinet member, stated during a budget hearing Nov. 20, “Let’s have a little fun here,” then caustically derided Arduin, who was not present.

Staring at Mike Genest, Arduin’s chief aide, Dunn declared: “I think personally, Mike, that you are the Director of Finance, and she is more of a figurehead.”

(The Democrats have chosen Arduin as their whipping post in part because during the recall campaign, Arduin said an audit would reveal obvious, major cuts. Democrats are positively fried about this implicit criticism of their past budget cuts.)

I spoke to Tom Martinez, chief aide to Senate Majority Leader Don Perata. Both Martinez and Perata are known for generally dealing fairly with Republicans.

Martinez said of Dunn’s attack, “That sort of behavior does not happen in the Senate. We do not expect to see it continue. It doesn’t reflect most members’ desire to work together.”

No? Powerful Sen. President Pro Tem John Burton is behaving even worse than Dunn. First, Burton called those wanting to repeal SB 60 “racist,” before he grumpily agreed to repeal the law, in the face of massive public opposition. Then, in a direct slap at Schwarzenegger, on Nov. 25 Burton introduced an awful bill to repeal even the wimpy workers compensation reforms the Democrats approved this year.

Why? Because Burton is mad that Arnold criticized the Democratic package as woefully insufficient reform—an accurate criticism.

Although Burton is given a free pass by the California political media, who dote on him because he laces his interviews with a standup comic routine liberally spiced with the f-word, Burton is in fact one of the truly tragic figures in Sacramento.

Burton’s years of wrongheaded leadership—forcing huge and permanent welfare expenditures when California had no lasting means to pay, completely ignoring the state’s infrastructure, and preventing major spending cuts when the state went broke—has helped put California where it is. Although 2004 is Burton’s last year in office, he can still do tremendous harm to California’s fiscal health.

But let’s not forget that the Assembly Republicans started this cascading series of events, purposely embarrassing the Democrats on day one.

I hope it was well worth the 20 minutes of public crowing the Republicans got to perform.