Budget Dawdlers Are Fit to Be Cuffed

Anybody know where I can get a whole bag of those plastic handcuffs, cheap? The ones that look like garbage bag ties, that cops use when they arrest a load of protesters?

Because I’m thinking about flying up to Sacramento and walking onto the floor of the state Assembly and making about 80 citizen’s arrests.

The citizen would be me. The arrestees would be the entire state Assembly, which is now nearly two months over the July 1 constitutional deadline on passing a budget.

I don’t know whether violating the state Constitution is a criminal offense. If it is, is it a misdemeanor or a felony? Or just an infraction, like possessing a teeny bit of marijuana, in which case the cops would only have to write up 80 tickets instead of snapping 80 mug shots and inking 800 fingerprints.

A citizen’s arrest is my second choice to get the Assembly off its budget duff (the Senate passed a budget back in June, the brown-nosers).

My first choice would be to do what some really peeved Catholics did about 700 years ago. The conclave of cardinals was meeting to elect a new pope, and it hemmed and it hawed and it dithered--this went on for months.

So the good Catholics outside first cut off the wine deliveries to the princes of the church. Then they cut off food and water. At last they removed the roof to get them to hurry it up in there.

Think that’d work? Cut off the pizza deliveries, switch off the AC, turn off the toilets and see how fast things would get done.

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The Bakersfield Californian had a nifty story about one of those slick pieces of business that makes people think of politicians ... well, the way that people think about politicians.

The story said that some Assembly members scooted back to Sacramento on Sunday evening, July 7, just to punch the clock so they could get an additional $484 each in per-diem money. That’s four days of their living-expense allowance for bunking in Sacramento much of the year.

The Fourth fell on a Thursday, making for an unusually long weekend.

The rules say that if the Legislature is out of session for more than three days, legislators can’t collect that $121 per day; by checking back into the Capitol before Sunday’s midnight witching hour, a legislator could get the most out of the four-day holiday--hit a few patriotic civic barbecues, make a few stirring speeches about America and service--and still collect some substantial simoleons.

Still, they won’t be seeing that money for a while. Kathleen Connell, the state controller, has cut off paychecks to elected officials, including herself and the governor, until a budget is passed. (This wouldn’t really hurt some of them; Gov. Davis could subsist on fund-raising dinners.)

When those checks do show up in the mail, I suggest the midnight clockers patriotically hand over their Fourth of July share to charities that help some of the people who’ve been hurting since no budget has meant no money for them:

People trying to enroll in college on state grants are hurting. Disabled people are hurting. Some old people are hurting. Some blind people are hurting. Some blind people’s guide dogs are hurting.

People begin to wonder: If California can’t get its act together to meet a budget, why should they? If California isn’t spending their tax money where it should be, why should they bother paying it?

Ten years ago this summer, when the Legislature was sitting for so long on an overdue budget that you thought they were trying to hatch it, a Sacramento country and western station staged a “Dog Aid� benefit for guide and companion dogs who, like their owners, weren’t getting their support checks.

But because of privacy rules, the radio station couldn’t find out who the needy were. OK, fine; it gave un-addressed stamped envelopes to the proper agency so it could tell the needy where they could pick up the dog food. But even worse--get this--the state’s legal services people fussed over whether the disabled people might find their benefits docked for “outside income�--the free dog food.

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In truth, very serious things are at stake, or legislators wouldn’t keep themselves in lockdown in Sacramento’s three-digit summer. From the footloose and flush days of surpluses, there’s now a $23.6-billion budget hole.

The largely Democratic-crafted budget has both cuts and tax hikes, and Republicans oppose any tax increases at all, lest some future challenger points an outraged finger to “my tax-and-spend opponent,� even if the higher tax were on some sinful substance like devil-weed tobacco.

The budget would raise the cigarette tax from 87 cents to $3 a pack (New York City just hoisted its from 8 cents to $1.50 a pack.) Another measure to raise the smoking age from 18 to 21 dragged its butts through committees, partly because it would mean a lot of lost revenue from the young, dumb and free-spending--and partly, I suspect, because as awful as making budget cuts is, it’s nothing compared with the prospect of creating bands of cold-turkey, nicotine-deprived teenagers who have finally found something worth voting for--or against.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].