Dan Walters: California Legislature once again earns scorn

Last Tuesday, the Public Policy Institute of California issued a new poll that found, among other things, just 17 percent of the state's voters like the Legislature's performance.

Simultaneously, the Legislature's top leaders provided another reason for Californians to harbor such scorn.

Assembly Speaker John Pérez and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg announced that they would spend untold amounts of taxpayers' money on high-priced lawyers to sue state Controller John Chiang over his decision to withhold legislators' paychecks last year after they failed to enact a balanced budget.

Chiang was merely enforcing a new provision of the state constitution that voters enacted in 2010 – a change of budget law that the Democratic legislative leaders themselves had championed, along with their allies in public employee unions.

Proposition 25's chief purpose was to eliminate the two-thirds legislative vote requirement on budgets, thereby allowing Democrats to pass budgets without Republicans. Concerned that voters would see that as a naked power grab, the measure's sponsors included a sweetener: legislators' pay would be docked if they didn't balance the budget by June 15.

It was a campaign gimmick, and the measure's sponsors never thought that it would actually be applied. After all, they assumed, the Legislature could pass some kind of budget by June 15 and pronounce it balanced to technically comply.

That's exactly what the Legislature did, but Gov. Jerry Brown then vetoed the plan, declaring it unbalanced, and Chiang invoked Proposition 25 to cut off legislators' pay.

The howling from the Capitol's occupants was tellingly self-serving. How dare Chiang take the measure seriously, they complained; isn't he a loyal Democrat?

The cutoff lasted only a couple of weeks because Brown miraculously declared that the state would get an extra $4 billion in revenue. Legislators quickly revised the budget to include the miracle money, declaring it to be balanced, and Chiang just as quickly restored their pay.

Everyone knew that the $4 billion was unlikely to appear, and some months later, Brown revealed that just half of it was likely to show up, triggering some automatic spending cuts.

But the shortfall, coupled with higher-than-budgeted spending, means the fiscal year will probably end on June 30 with the state a couple of billion dollars in the red.

In other words, the budget was never balanced, and legislators should humbly apologize for taking their pay. Instead, their leaders are suing to make sure the pay cutoff never happens again, wrapping themselves in the dubious assertion that Chiang violated separation of powers.

It's the sort of self-dealing arrogance that richly earns voters' contempt.