Friday, July 3rd, 2009...10:01 am
Why I’m Not Celebrating the Vetoes, And You Shouldn’t Be Either
So, we are supposed to be slapping Jan Brewer on the back for line item vetoing portions of the budget and calling the legislature into special session to fix all the damage they’ve done.
Sorry man, not me.
She vetoed several line items, including state aid for K-12 education. Because of the way education is funded, there is money in the pipeline for a few weeks (as long as Dean Martin continues to sign the warrants). However, if no legislation is passed in the meantime to restore this funding, our state’s schools will be without millions of dollars just in time for teachers to be returning to work to plan for the year.
I suppose you could call this hardball. I’d rather she didn’t play this sort of game when it puts the fate of our school system in jeopardy. As if using our students and teachers as an ante in a game of political hardball wasn’t bad enough, she hasn’t demonstrated much skill at political hardball. Maybe wiffle ball or t-ball is more her game.
Now, we have a special session to look forward to where everything will be fixed. Already, we are seeing a lack of leadership on her part. First, her call for special session is relatively vague, meaning that legislators are given room for all sorts of mischief. Next, last I checked, she hasn’t put forward anything specific and hasn’t met with legislative leaders of either party. She’s got three days over a holiday weekend to do so, and she hasn’t built a reputation of one that burns the midnight oil.
I’m not sure how talks with party leaders in the legislature would go right now anyway. She’s demonstrated no willingness to seriously meet with the Democrats, and has made disingenuous claims about the Democrats lack of willingness to do so. Tlatoani Kirk Adams felt blindsided by Brewer’s vetoes, and Marszałek Senatu Bob Burns went so far as to call Brewer “incompetent.”
I’ve said this before, but I need to say it again: Brewer got us into this situation by refusing to engage this discussion for months without anything except platitudes. Democratic leaders have a budget plan, and Republican leaders have a budget plan (yes, it sucks, but it is a plan). Brewer had “five points.” Bullet points do not a plan make, and don’t ask me to give any credit when she, at the last minute, when things are in a verge of collapse, decides to finally weigh in with at best, a poorly thought out measure.
NB – Yes, I mixed a metaphor. Deal with it.
8 Comments
July 3rd, 2009 at 12:33 pm
There’s nothing to celebrate in all of this, but for what it’s worth, I think the vetoes heralded the end of Brewer’s career in electoral politics.
If she runs next year, she’ll face a cattle call primary, and in the unlikely event she gets through that, everything that has happened so far pretty much destroys any chance of her winning in the general.
About her only chance is to come up with a plan that pulls it all together this week, and I haven’t seen any indication of that. Have you?
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I disagree with you on most points, Ted.
The budget she vetoed was a dangerous one and we can’t accept that kind of funding for our schools. I mean, if the legislature said we will only provide one roll per per inmate per month of toilet paper to the prisons would you be upset if she vetoed the prisons budget because then they wouldn’t have a budget? That’s in effect what she vetoed in terms of the schools.
You have to draw the line at what level of funding is unacceptable and she did that. As a parent (and you, Ted, know very well by now that I care a lot about what my kids learn growing up, because I make a point of dragging one or occasionally both of my twins with me to state party meetings not because it wouldn’t be easier to leave them at home but because they do learn some things they wouldn’t learn otherwise.)
I agree with you that she showed a lot of failure of leadership in getting to this point, and also that she should have limited the special session to the budget, but this legislature deserved to be punished for passing this budget.
Since locking Jack Harper, Ron Gould and Pamela Gorman out of the room during the special session isn’t a realistic option we will probably see a very ugly special session but that’s still better than signing onto that last budget.
As far as Governor Brewer, I think people learn by experience. Recall that after replacing Fife Symington, Calamity Jane actually looked OK by comparison and stood up for the schools in her partial term. So in 1998 she ran for a full elected term and won (in fact, I admit that’s the last time I voted for a Republican.) Her elected term was a total disaster and ended with a billion dollar hole caused by the alt-fuels scandal. So if anyone suggests that there is anything to Jan Brewer all one need remind them of is the uncanny similarity she bears to Calamity Jane.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Let me clarify:
I don’t mean I think that Governor Brewer will learn anything by experience (she’s already in her sixties and obviously all that experience hasn’t ‘learnt’ her enough.)
What I mean is that most voters (at least those who’ve been here long enough to remember) will have learned from the experience of watching Jane Hull fail and won’t vote for another Jane Hull administration next year.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I’m not celebrating it; I’m just laughing at it all in disbelief, because at this point there’s nothing else you can really do. Just when you think it can’t get anymore absurd, they up the ante.
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens in the special session (my guess is that tax hikes won’t pass nor will tax “changes” pass as proposed by the Democrats). Since none of the various factions are willing to give up their political plums in compromise to the other factions I can only assume we get more stalemate.
I wonder which legislators are already off on vacation and how many will remain in Phoenix come Monday.
July 4th, 2009 at 10:10 am
I think what she has done bodes well for the general. It is the primary she keeps making more difficult. She is being perceived as fighting for education and that is a very mainstream ideal. Chuck Coughlin is smart. He is already fighting for November 2010.
July 4th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Mark:
As I said, Calamity Jane all over again.
Let’s be smarter this time around.
July 5th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Brewer is attempting to triangulate between the Democrats and her own party’s legislative leadership. Thus, I agree with Mark that she is already mapping out her strategy for a general election. Imitation being one form of flattery (I don’t agree with the old saw that it it the most sincere form), it could be argued that she is trying to have the public view her in the same way that Janet always sought to be seen as the grown-up in the room when she was playing her own triangulation games with the Legislature.
Brewer, however, has completely misjudged not only her own level of support, but also the ideological composition of her own party. While she has tried to get Chamber of Commerce-types behind her five-point plan, she has forgotten that those folks will not call the tune in any primary, another point where I agree with Mark. She would have been smarter to get into the game earlier, cultivate some supporters in the Legislature other than Carolyn Allen and also get out onto the hustings by talking to the grass roots about her plans, not just the corporate elite in this state.
The reason she might yet survive a primary is because it is unlikely that the Right will coalesce its support behind one candidate who is also palatable to other Republicans, including those Brewer was schmoozing. Those people might then do what they have been threatening to do for some time and mount a third-party bid that would almost guarantee a Democrat as our next governor. It would then be essential for virtually every legislative district to be targeted by the state party so that the new guv could actually have a working majority on their side.