Our view: We can't afford intransigence in Sacramento

It’s often said that politics is the art of compromise. If that’s true, it’s hard to imagine anything less artful than what’s going on in Sacramento these days.

And it’s hard to ignore the fact that one particular faction is flat-out refusing to compromise: legislative Republicans.

California’s budget deficit is now estimated at nearly $40 billion. The state has suspended infrastructure projects. It’s on the verge of issuing IOUs instead of payments to contractors and instead of rebates to income taxpayers. The governor wants state employees, including more than 1,500 working in Del Norte County, to absorb two unpaid days per month.

Amid this fiscal chaos, a three-ring circus plays on at the capital. Democrats propose solutions heavy on new revenue generation. Republican legislators insist on bigger spending cuts and absolutely no new taxes. Gov. Schwarzenegger dances in between.

The sobering reality, according to the Sacramento Bee, is that even if you took every cut Republicans have proposed (from eliminating transit funds to cutting payments for the aged, blind and disabled to $10.6 billion from schools) and added it to every tax the Democrats propose to raise (tripling the car tax and suspending the indexing of tax rates), you’d still only solve $23.7 billion of the deficit.

The deficit is a monster, and when the populace is threatened by a monster, it behooves our leaders to pull together to fight it. Instead, they remain locked in a stalemate that approaches the surreal.

It takes a two-thirds majority in the Legislature to approve new taxes. Republicans, while in the minority, have enough votes to stop any such legislation.

So while Democrats and our Republican governor push for various solutions that mix new revenue and spending cuts, the GOP legislators insist its their way or the highway — except that highway may not be passable because of a lack of funding.

At this point, it’s really not a matter of who is politically in the right. Certainly the Republicans can defend their no-new-taxes stand in philosophical terms. And they did propose their own budget plan calling for $15.6 billion in cuts (more than two-thirds of which target education) and $6 billion in revenue that would be taken from pots of money approved by voters specifically for health care for children and the mentally ill.

Likewise, Democrats can defend their attempts to preserve more government services with proposals that are heavier on tax increases than on spending cuts. Their last legitimate budget proposal called for $11.3 billion in tax hikes and $7 billion in spending cuts.

When their GOP colleagues torpedoed that, they got cute and tried to subvert the requirement of a two-thirds majority by calling all their new revenue proposals “fees” instead of “taxes.” The governor terminated that back-door approach.

There are philosophical differences, yes. Some people believe properly targeted government spending can pull the economy back up. Others believe spending cuts are a better answer.

Schwarzenegger may be coming across as most reasonable right now because he’s proposing a sizable dollop of each, but his plan is actually much closer to that of the Democrats than of his GOP colleagues beneath the dome.

Legislative Republicans are the intransigent third party in this fiasco. They can try to explain that as staying true to a no-new-taxes pledge, but the fact is they represent all Californians, including those who established the Democrats as the majority party in the Legislature.

That doesn’t mean Republican lawmakers should kowtow, but it does mean they should use their leverage to compromise rather than to obstruct.

There is a higher calling now than adhering to rigid partisan pledges.