| Despite all the political wrangling over specific budget solutions, there is one thing Democrats and Republicans in Sacramento agree on: the bulk of the budget solution should be spending cuts. All that is being fought over now is whether the cuts will be merely reckless or catastrophic. It reflects a political consensus that isn't based in economic logic - we've demonstrated before how the budget cuts are going to worsen the recession.
And it is also based on massive lawbreaking. The budget cutting mania of the last two years in Sacramento has been, at its core, an attack on the laws of the state of California and the United States of America. Zeal to make budget cuts has led the Legislature and the Governor to fall afoul of any number of laws designed to protect public services and resources. Some examples:
• The National Parks Service threatened to seize numerous state parks in recent days and reminded the state of its obligations under laws dating back 60 years to keep parkland purchased with federal aid open "in perpetuity".
• A state appeals court ruled yesterday that diverting billions in public transit money to other uses was illegal. An earlier court ruling that such diversions were illegal didn't stop the legislature from trying to revise the law to make legal the elimination of state funding of local transit agencies, but yesterday's ruling held that even this violated at least four state laws and voter-approved initiatives.
• There is the ongoing saga over the February budget deal's cut of $9 billion in education money owed under Prop 98. The California Faculty Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and several other organizations sued the state over the refusal to pony up the money owed. Sacramento tried to head off the suit by Proposition 1B on the May 19 ballot, which voters rejected.
• Efforts to cut state worker pay, benefits, and jobs have frequently run afoul of the courts, in examples sadly too numerous to list here.
• And of course there's the long-running battle over prisons. Federal receiver J. Clark Kelso remains likely to take billions directly from the general fund to address prison health care problems. Sacramento's reaction? Sue to deny Kelso authority over state prisons.
This is all part of a larger pattern of lawbreaking, from the habitual ignorance of the constitutional mandate to have a budget in place by June 30 to the efforts to evade the rules regarding the federal stimulus funds. John Adams once called the United States an "empire of laws, not men" and yet Sacramento appears to have instead decided Howard Jarvis is the state's true Founding Father, holding the line against taxes by any means possible, even illegal means.
Americans are becoming inured to the systematic ignorance of the law by their political leaders. The Bush Administration and their Democratic enablers have set the tone - when your path is blocked by a law, ignore the law. It's deeply damaging to our democracy, to our institutions, not to mention to our economy. We keep being told the state must "live within its means" - and yet those means never seem to include the law. |
