The Sacramento Bee published an article today, Friday October 23, in which the headline was exactly what the title of this post is. The entire article can be read here.
Basically the article says that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is now blaming judges, especially on the Federal level, for the ongoing budget crisis that California is currently embroiled in. Judges have been striking down some of the budget gimmicks that were included in the most current California budget as either un-constitutional or outright illegal.
He complained in particular about judicial actions that have struck down some state worker furloughs, required reductions in the prison population, imposed restrictions on water delivery in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and this week blocked cuts to in-home care services.
Judges have only been striking down or altering those things in the budget that are in fact illegal or un-constitutional. Its a good thing too, since if something is illegal it is illegal. Right?
Well, not if your the Governor of California apparently.
Gov. Schwarzenegger’s response to this was…
In his defense, Schwarzenegger said, “Every decision that we make we run by the legal department and the experts, and their opinion is that those things are legal.”
The governor blamed judges for not considering the state’s fiscal straits when issuing their opinions.
Now, I know this may be a minor point but would the State of California take any one of our fiscal straights into consideration if we committed a crime or violated another persons rights. I don’t think so. When a judge and jury find a person guilty of stealing copper wire (something that was a major problem last year in the state) they certainly didn’t take into consideration the fact that the person may have been doing it because they were in severe ‘financial straights’.
He followed up with this little comment that I actually find incredibly offensive comming from the Governor of a state.
“Whenever they agree with me, they’re right, very simple,” Schwarzenegger said wryly when told they sometimes rule in his favor. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re wrong and they’re interfering with our governing of the state.”
Tell me please where a person gets that kind of unbridled hubris. I have found that when I am wrong at the beginning I am still wrong no matter who it is that agrees with me. If alot of people agree with me when I am wrong, that just means that alot of other people are also wrong. There was no mention of his being right or wrong, only that “Whenever they agree with me, they’re right, very simple,” Schwarzenegger said wryly when told they sometimes rule in his favor. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re wrong and they’re interfering with our governing of the state.”
You can’t make this stuff up, nobody would believe you if you did.
I realize that the State of California is in some dire straights when it comes to the budget and that something needed to be done to avert a total meltdown. The problem is that the things that the Governor and California legislature did or refused to do solved absolutely nothing. It merely kicked the can down the road until next year. Once it comes time to do the next budget they will still have the exact same problems they did this time around only it will be compounded by falling tax reciepts and other factors as well.
“The budget is about trying to push off fiscal problems into the future, and one way to do that is to do things that may be legally dubious because you know it’s going to take the courts time to strike them down,” said Vikram Amar, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Doing things that are arguably illegal is a form of borrowing because no court has told you yet that you can’t.”
And that was precisely the reason that these things were included in the budget in the first place. Because no court had told them they couldn’t do them to push back the budget problems another year, they included them in the budget knowing that they were on legally shaky ground.
When tackling a two-year deficit of $60 billion in the past year, state leaders pursued solutions that experts warned were legally risky. But without enacting them, leaders risked further damage to California’s credit rating as it paid bills with IOUs.
I am afraid I have to say that it is not the judges that have gone “absolutely crazy”, it is our Governor that has lost his mind and gone absolutely crazy along with the legislators that passed this budget in the first place.
You have to know that with a state government that would do these sorts of things and say these sorts of things California’s problems are very far from being over and may have only just begun.
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