California Gov. Jerry Brown Discovers California Republicans are Intransigent

Balanced Approach Does Not Work with an Unbalanced Minority

In the 2010 elections Republicans swept almost every state, but one state that went against the trend was California.  Despite being heavily outspent by a wealthy Republican opponent, former California Governor Jerry Brown easily won election to the statehouse. His Democratic colleagues have large majorities in the state legislature.



Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Gov. Jerry Brown of California, his wife and

advisers studied legislation at his office courtyard.



Mr. Brown campaigned on a balanced approach to the state’s budget problems.  He proposed to dramatically cut spending and to ask for tax increases, but only if they were approved in a referendum by the voters.  The result, Republicans eagerly accepted the budget cuts but used their minority status to block the public vote on tax increases.  As often the case, Republicans feared that the majority of voters did not support the Republican positions, so Republicans didn’t want a vote.

Gov. Brown was apparently surprised by the changes in the Republican opposition since the last time that he had held the office of Governor.

Mr. Brown has told friends he was unprepared for the extent, in his view, to which Republicans have not made sufficient efforts to accommodate him on critical issues, like putting on the ballot measures to extend taxes to avoid budget cuts.

In one case, Mr. Brown told a friend, he said he felt like “we weren’t even on the same playing field” in negotiating face to face with a Republican lawmaker who would not accept his assertion that most money in the California education budget did not go to administrative costs. Mr. Brown said he finally just stood up and left the meeting.

The Governor does believe he has been a success,

For all the obstacles, Mr. Brown said he had overseen the passage of an on-time budget for the first time in five years, and sharply reduced the structural budget deficit, producing a markedly better view of California finances from Wall Street.

and is not going to give up trying to travel the middle road of spending cuts and tax increases

He said he would propose another budget next year that again offered the Legislature a choice between raising taxes or imposing more cuts, in the belief that at some point, voter backlash to reductions would push some Republicans to act on taxes.

“I mean, how much less school do you want?” he said.

But in the end a small minority of Conservatives may have this result

Mr. Brown’s legacy could very much be defined as being a Democrat who oversaw a huge retrenchment in state government built, in part, by Mr. Brown and his father.

which would certainly be okay if that is what the voters want.  So far the electoral results say that is not the case, and the fact that Republicans will not even allow a vote on increasing taxes says a lot about how the Republicans feel about democracy. 

They don’t like it.