| You could blame the Senate Democrats. After all, they walked away. Of course, they only walked away after it became pretty clear House Republicans were pretty intent on walking away. After being screwed by a change in a decades old budget process mid-session, and dealing with child-like antics, were Senate Democrats supposed to just keep coddling the House Republicans? You can only appease folks for so long.
Hell, you could blame the Governor. Wasn't he in California last week? Sure, but last I checked, the Governor being gone isn't much of an excuse for House Republicans being so damn stupid. Hell, this week, we may have avoided problems if the Governor had been gone again. He may not have offered a compromise to Mike Lange, infuriating the crazy guy who is #2 in the House. The Gov put out his agenda, had his advisors in place, and left negotiations going while he took off. Does anyone doubt for a second that his team didn't know what would be acceptable and what wouldn't? And is the Speaker really so sad that he can't cut a deal with the President of the Senate without the Gov's permission. Frankly, it was a golden opportunity for the GOP when Brian left the state. It demonstrated their own lack of leadership. Brian's biggest mistake was overestimating the ability of the House Republicans to get anything done.
You could blame Rep. John Sinrud. He set a lot of this in motion by deciding to slice and dice the budget up into six eight four multiple bills, breaking a decades old tradition. But that's probably not quite fair.
There should be no doubt that without Rep. Mike Lange's derailment earlier this week, the session may have actually gotten something accomplished. Swamping the media cycle with 3 days of "Oh-my-god-the-Republican-leader-is-the-biggest-idiot-I've-ever-encounted-in-my-life" didn't help anything. And the blame for that falls right on Mr. Lange's shoulders.
But, really, this all comes down to Sideshow. Sideshow Scott Sales marched in right after the election and threw out all of his party's campaign promises. He then declared war and said he would give no quarter. He appointed the nuttiest of the nutty to committee chairmanships (in some cases, he also appointed some clearly incompetent folks -- and some incompetent nuts). Then, for a while, he disappeared, only reappearing at the end follow Lange's explosion and really failing to do much of anything.
The fact is that 85% of the blame for this outcome rests on the House Republicans' shoulders. They thought that with half the votes in the legislature, they deserved their desired outcome. Talking to folks close to the negotiations, it matches up pretty clearly with my impression from news stories: the Republicans just weren't negotiating. They were waiting for Democratic proposals and saying, "No," before denouncing the Democrats for negotiating in bad faith.
The "party of business" has no clue how to handle the negotiating table. That's pathetic.
The GOP is pointing repeatedly to some website that says "Give everyone $1,000 in tax relief." Cool idea (joking, I don't give a damn about a check -- I want my government to work properly), but here's the funny thing: The Dems had "$600 in tax relief for everyone" on the table. That's actually pretty damn big. What happened to it? Down the drain with everything else.
Where do we go from here? A special session starting maybe a week from Monday, although that's still up in the air.
Hopefully, these GOP legislators will hear from the folks back home over the next week or so. They'll be getting, I'm sure, the same question over and over: WTF. |
