California Kumbaya: The new legislative session convened in Sacramento yesterday and in an unusual move Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) invited the GOP governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to attend the swearing-in ceremonies. Nunez, along with Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland), pledged to work with the governor to replicate the successes they had at the end of the last session, including raising the minimum wage, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, regulating greenhouse gas emissions and borrowing $37 billion to upgrade the state’s schools and roads.
Since 1966, there have only been three years in which Republicans have controlled either house of the California Legislature, but during the same period they have controlled the governor’s office for 27 years.
Republicans had hoped that the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger was the beginning of the end of liberal entrenchment in Sacramento. But Gov. Schwarzenegger bungled his first year or so in office, so much so that by November 2005 his approval rating was in the low 30s. After the “thumpin”’ he received from voters in the special election last year, in which all the ballot measures he’d floated lost big, Schwarzenegger did an abrupt 180. After spending more than a year treating the Democrats like enemy combatants, suddenly he was their new BFF.
It was purely enlightened self-interest on the governor’s part but the course change resulted both in the legislative successes Nunez touted yesterday and the landslide reelection victory the governor celebrated last month.
But even by California standards, the current team in Sacramento is unusually liberal. In fact, the Assembly leaders are so diverse that they are surely Rush Limbaugh’s living nightmare:
[Speaker Nunez] took the stage at a Capitol press conference surrounded by a dozen members of his Democratic leadership team. There wasn’t a single straight white male to be found…
The Assembly leadership team onstage included five men and seven women. There is the first African American woman elected as majority floor leader, Karen Bass from Los Angeles. Three of the women are entering their first terms in the Legislature — Laura Richardson from Long Beach, Fiona Ma from San Francisco, and Mary Hayashi from Hayward. Two gay men will control all the money — [Mark Leno of San Francisco] is chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, and John Laird of Santa Cruz is chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee.
The question now is whether the governor will continue to lean left to work with Nunez and company — and, who knows, perhaps revive the moribund liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” as “Schwarzenegger Republicans” — or whether he’ll swing back to the dark side as dramatically as he went granola this year.
My bet is on the dark side. Schwarzenegger has socially liberal instincts — he can talk the talk — but the prime factor that guides him is old-school paternalism. He is the sort of conservative who promotes adherence to orthodoxy but feels in no way personally beholden to live by the same rules himself.
All that prevents him from inviting the California Chamber of Commerce back into the governor’s office, as he did early on, to draft the same sort of Big Business-oriented legislation that angered Democrats and independents in 2005 — nothing except the prospect of running for Barbara Boxer’s senate seat in 2010, or the ironic albeit outside chance he’d face the same sort of recall election that brought him to power in 2003.
Once a whore to power, always a whore to power, and California has a history of loving their whores to power….Good luck with this fascist trans plant…..
who is one of the biggest whores on this planet….