[Video] State Senate Republicans speak out against Democrat Budget

Posted by Jon Fleischman at 8:37 am on Jun 29, 2011

Yesterday Capitol Democrats pushed through a majority vote budget that is bad for California. On the short term, it makes a lot of poor decisions on how to spend available resources. On the long term, there are no fixes such as a spending cap or pension reform. Not one Republican voted for this bad budget.

Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton had this to say…

Let’s get one thing clear about the budget the Democrats passed without Republican input or support – we will never fix this state’s chronic budget crisis until we get Californians back to work.

We need to focus on job creation, which must include regulatory and CEQA reform. We cannot continue to be the worst place in the nation to do business. Regulatory relief is critical for creating job opportunities in this state.

This budget not only lacks regulatory relief that is critical for creating job opportunities, it lacks the other reforms that Californians are demanding and deserve. Californians want a hard spending cap and they want reforms to fix the unsustainable state and local pension systems. Pension reform is the only way to ensure that state and local governments can continue to fund essential services in the future.

This is a “Hope without Change” budget. It relies on the hope for billions of phantom dollars and does nothing, absolutely nothing, to change government as usual.

Even worse, it does nothing to put people back to work.

Several members of the Senate Republican Caucus spoke out against the Democrats’ budget package during the Senate Floor debate. Following are excerpts of their Floor speeches:

Senate GOP Leader Bob Dutton