The Arizona Guardian (good-looking newspaper, $30 per month subscription!) is reporting that the senate passed a budget in the wee hours of the night.
The Arizona Republic also has a fairly detailed story up on their site as well. It is a must read, if you can stomach it. Here are some snipits.
They did not begin discussion on the budget before midnight, as they scurried around in the dark attempting to "get the language right" and twist as many arms as possible for support.
Why the rush? Why did it have to happen this way? You need 16 votes to pass a budget (or any bill) in the senate. Today, one of those sixteen votes is leaving for a vacation. Another one of those votes tried to sneak out through a back door last night but was caught and finally pressured into supporting the budget.
It's all a game, you see. They needed to pass something so the governor can veto it, and then they can "come together" and work out a compromise deal. If they just compromised without all the posturing and positioning it would hurt their re-election chances.
It's more like some strange kabuki theater than state government.
Despite the threat of a veto from Gov. Jan Brewer, Senate Republicans labored through the night to pass an $8.2 billion budget they expect will have to be revised later this month and later this year.
The Arizona Republic also has a fairly detailed story up on their site as well. It is a must read, if you can stomach it. Here are some snipits.
Sen. John Nelson, R-Litchfield Park, was a late-night holdout, snagged by Senate leaders as he was trying to leave via a back staircase. After about an hour of closed-door meetings with Burns, as well as Adams, Nelson threw his support behind a budget that, he said, resulted from a deeply flawed process.
He said he was troubled by the speed with which changes to the spending plan were made, often without any notice to lawmakers, and certainly without a chance to review the bills, which collectively run for dozens of pages of technical language.
"We're going from here to the floor without any time for people to read the bills and understand what's in there," said Nelson.
[...]
The budget cuts $220 million from K-12 education, reserving the largest dollar cut for the state's largest spending item.
[...]
However, the budget bills do make dozens of policy changes, ranging from a moratorium on city development fees to ending a nine-month-old policy that extended state benefits to the domestic partners of state employees. That policy was enacted by former Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, by executive order.
They did not begin discussion on the budget before midnight, as they scurried around in the dark attempting to "get the language right" and twist as many arms as possible for support.
Why the rush? Why did it have to happen this way? You need 16 votes to pass a budget (or any bill) in the senate. Today, one of those sixteen votes is leaving for a vacation. Another one of those votes tried to sneak out through a back door last night but was caught and finally pressured into supporting the budget.
It's all a game, you see. They needed to pass something so the governor can veto it, and then they can "come together" and work out a compromise deal. If they just compromised without all the posturing and positioning it would hurt their re-election chances.It's more like some strange kabuki theater than state government.
Is that why you elected them?
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