COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Protect wallet by keeping two-thirds vote requirement

The state budget this year is once again deadlocked in the Legislature.

Every year when this happens, the majority party labels the minority party as obstructionists. The main culprit, they say, is California’s two-thirds vote requirement for adopting the state budget. Recently, both Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have suggested the two-thirds voting requirement for passing a budget should be eliminated.

I could not disagree more. California’s constitution requires that at least two-thirds of the state’s legislators must agree on the budget in order for it to pass. That means at least 27 of the 40 senators must vote for the budget, which the current liberal majority sees as an unreasonable obstacle to their desire to pass a budget that contains millions of dollars of new spending for some of their pet projects.

On the other hand, I see the two-thirds requirement as a prudent protection of taxpayers’ pocketbooks. It’s also consistent with the philosophy of our nation’s Founding Fathers, who wanted to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

As recently as 2004, California voters, by an overwhelming majority, rejected the idea of eliminating the two-thirds vote requirement to pass the state budget. That was Proposition 56 and it was quite properly opposed by Schwarzenegger. Now he thinks it is a good idea. So, why does he all of a sudden publicly support an idea that the public overwhelmingly rejected just a few years ago? Good question!

It is logical to make it more difficult to increase state spending when such increased spending will almost certainly mean California’s citizens will have to pay more in fees or taxes. The two-thirds vote requirement not only places a hurdle in the path of a potentially runaway majority, it ensures the minority has input into the budget process.

When Gray Davis was governor, the liberal majority had consistently ignored and undermined the minority’s recommendations and warnings about state overspending. It appears this sort of behavior has carried over into the Schwarzenegger administration. The current budget proposal is not balanced and spends nearly three quarters of a billion dollars more than it receives.

This budget has been predicated on too much borrowing and spending, unrealistic revenue projections and a great deal of smoke-and-mirrors accounting gimmickry. It does not contain a single reduction in spending and has actually grown more during this administration than during the previous administration.

The true culprit in California’s annual budget impasse is the majority’s inability to say “no” to the well-financed special interest spending lobbyists. While it isn’t failsafe, the two-thirds vote requirement is our only hope for curbing continued out-of-control spending.