The state constitution requires that the legislature pass a budget by June 15, which is today. Will our well-paid, full-time legislature fulfill to its constitutional duty? Not according to the Democrat’s fearless leader, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez.
What’s holding up the budget? According to Nunez, it’s the Republicans’ darned obsession with illegal immigration. The Assembly Reps have said that they won’t vote for the Democrats’ effort to expand the state-funded children’s health programs to include illegal immigrant children.
In the Governor’s revised budget proposal, he added an additional $23 million in general funds and personnel to expand coverage to 24,000 uninsured children of the working poor. According to the Assembly Republican Caucus, the Democrats, in negotiations leading up to a legislative vote, expanded the Healthy Families program to cover illegal immigrants and families of four with annual incomes of about $53,000.
Nunez and his caucus, of course, want to defend the augmentation as taking care of children. But the reality is that it is another attempt to expand the state’s social services to benefit illegal immigrants. Let’s be clear: we’re not talking about emergency medical care. That is already provided to anyone living in the state, illegal or not. These programs cover preventive health care services. While these services are important, especially for children, should we really be adding illegal immigrants to yet another welfare program? Parents of illegal immigrant children, the hard-working foks whom the Democrats say pay their fair share of taxes and aren’t a burden on state government (except for the cost of free public schooling for their kids, of course), certainly have the option of paying cash for well-care check-ups with their doctor.
Truly, how can we expect people in other countries to take our immigration laws seriously if we offer a variety of social service programs for people who have entered the country illegally? The message really is: we say we don’t want you to break our laws, but if you do, we’ll reward you and your family with an array of government programs and no government worker will ever tell the immigration authorities about you. No wonder we have a problem.
Under current federal guidelines, illegal immigrants are ineligible for the Healthy Families program. Whenever California expands a program beyond what the feds allow, we have to pay the full freight. The Assembly Republicans argue that if the Democrat’s expansion is approved, the state would be in jeopardy of losing the two-thirds of the Healthy Families budget that is paid for by the federal government.
Where is the governor on this issue? According to John Myers (KQED), during last week’s bus tour, the governor said every child should have health care. "Kids are vulnerable bystanders," he said. "They’re not really in control if they come here legally."
It’ll be interesting to see if the governor tries to help the Democrats force the Republicans into voting for this budget.
It is not secret that dealing with illegal immigration is a major issue to many rank-and-file Republicans. The governor is trying to woo swing voters and understandably doesn’t want to look mean. But he’s got to be aware that he got fewer votes than Tom McClintock in last week’s election. More than 32,000 Republican voters voted for McClintock but did not check Schwarzenegger’s box. Expanding social services to illegal immigrants—children or not—is not going to go over well with Schwarzenegger’s base. And whether he likes it or not, his base is the GOP. Once in a while, he’s got to act like he cares about what we care about. And understands that we’re not mean…we just want to see the law enforced and keep the budget in line.
If the Legislature was going to pass this budget, they’d need a minimum of six Assembly Republicans and two Senate Republicans. Hopefully, the budget voting won’t go the way of the bond package voting. Let’s see if the Republicans can stand tall against this bloated spending by the Democrats. Even if the press and the Democrats (and maybe the governor) call them mean.
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June 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Mr. Nunez ought to be recalled and indicted for breaking his oath (“…protect and defend…”)
June 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Chris Reed’s UT blog doesn’t link to each individual posting, so I will copy it below. He had an interesting post on this topic this week. http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/
Will illegal immigration fever grip the Legislature?
While illegal immigration has certainly been the story of the last two months locally and at the federal level, it’s tough to argue that it has been the story of the last two months in Sacramento — at least in terms of influencing legislation or making lawmakers hunt for political cover. That may change now, given this story in today’s U-T:
SACRAMENTO – A Democratic-written state budget is drawing fire from Republicans for expanding Healthy Families, a health care program for the children of the working poor, to include the children of illegal immigrants.
The new spending plan, which could be voted on by the Senate and Assembly on Thursday, drops a requirement limiting the program to the children of legal residents.
Will state Republicans be able to turn this into a political firefight similar to the one now going on in Congress over enforcement vs. “amnesty”? I doubt it. The argument that the children of illegal immigrants will receive much-more-costly care in emergency rooms if they don’t go to doctors for regular check-ups is persuasive, at least to those who might object to the Dems’ initiative on cost grounds.
But I am also confident that Dems either won’t try to use this bill as a way to hammer GOPers for their (implicitly racist) insensitivity or will fail if they do. For all the attempts to spin poll results as definitive indications of this or that, the evidence around the country at the retail level is overwhelming: helping illegal immigrants is not a political winner. So state Dems will try to do it, but quietly.
Posted at 05:42 PM