Riding the Ratchet

In the siege of a city, each of the final days plays out much like the one before, the monotony belying the imminent danger. Early on one particular brilliant and beautiful day last June, a kind of siege played out at the California State Capitol. Health advocates gathered on the west steps to rail against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts to Medi-Cal services for seniors and the disabled. On the north steps came a group of school support workers whose purple shirts--the ubiquitous uniform of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)--read, "Save our schools, fix this mess." In the days before the capitol grounds had been a stage for AIDS patients, in-home caregivers pushing profoundly disabled people in wheelchairs, and school moms in flaming yellow construction paper crowns (to signify how burning mad they were over education cuts), with their kids carrying hand-painted signs asking, "Arnold: Do your children go to public school?" As the Sacramento weather moved from balmy to baking, the routine of continual crisis seemed to mask California's inexorable creep toward what Schwarzenegger, an old hand in the apocalyptic school of branding, has called "fiscal Armageddon."

Inside "the building", as its denizens call the state capitol, Senate President Darrell Steinberg, an earnest Sacramento Democrat, rose to implore the Republican minority to vote for a stopgap bill to delay California's looming insolvency. He called the bill a "painful but necessary" measure to slash about one-eighth of the state budget. As he pleaded, a few blocks down the Capitol Mall an announcement by State Controller John Chiang underlined the urgency of the crisis. Without swift action, he said, in a week he would have no choice but to begin paying many of California's obligations--to contractors, scholarship students, welfare recipients and taxpayers awaiting refunds--with IOUs (later dubbed "Arnold Bucks"). Senate Republicans were unmoved. They would cast their votes, necessary under California's system of minority rule on fiscal matters, only for a "complete solution" to the state's $24 billion budget gap. As usual, that solution went undetailed, but everyone understood what the California GOP meant: no tax increases, and no Republican fingerprints on the corpses of the public services their constituents love to get, but hate to pay for.

With legislative gridlock reconfirmed, lawmakers headed off across the street, lobbyists in tow, to Frank Fat's, the Cosmo Café or the Citizen Hotel to attend one of a dozen campaign fundraisers ("Sponsor $3,900, ticket $1,000"). The dwindling corps of reporters rushed back to their offices to file accounts of government dysfunction. Two of the state's veteran journalists summed it up in the June 25 Los Angeles Times: "Simply put, California today is ungovernable." A week later the first IOUs were issued.

There's plenty of evidence to support that hypothesis. But like a lot of the other stories about California, this one leaves out a central reality: California teeters on the precipice because the state's conservatives want it that way. It's the perfect opportunity to achieve Grover Norquist's dream of making government small enough to drown in a bathtub.