COLUMNIST: BUDGET PROCESS ‘HUMILIATING AND DEMEANING’

PHOENIX, March 13 – The Republic’s Robert Robb today teed off on the budget process in a column that takes Republican legislators to the woodshed for turning the act of budgeting into a farce that produces bad public policy and damages the foundations of democratic governance. The onus for making changes belongs, Robb declares, to the back-benchers in the majority caucuses: “Rank-and-file Republican legislators need to revolt against Gov. Doug Ducey and legislative leaders over the state’s budget process. The current process is humiliating, demeaning and disrespectful to them. And it is a monumental disservice to the state.” The budget is the single important act the Legislature does each year, and though all 90 legislators are equally elected to represent voters, “all but a few are reduced to bit players, beggars and corrupt bargainers” when it comes to the budget. The “exclusionary and demeaning process” in place now – in which leaders and the governor negotiate the budget, announce a deal and then use high-pressure tactics to get it approved quickly – is a recent phenomenon, he wrote, and is a departure from the system in place until the late 1990s that saw the appro committees having real influence in driving the budget. “Each chamber had powerful subcommittees where the executive budget requests were scrutinized in detail. Appropriations subcommittees were so influential that legislators would give up chairing a full committee to head one up,” Robb reminisced. Only after each chamber passed its own budget did the “backroom deals and horse-trading” commence to reconcile the two budgets and reach an agreement with the governor. “But that was only part of the process, not the entirety of it,” he wrote. That process led to more inclusion, especially among Dems, who had participated while appro crafted the budget and had made deals along the way that would be discarded if they voted no at the end. By contrast, this year’s budget hinged on “renting a Democrat” and the “transparent venality” of Begay. Our system of government works because of the perception that public policy losers at least get a fair shot – but the current budget process shortcuts that, and “the losers feel, justifiably, that they were cheated.” And the GOP rank-and-file “should feel as though they have been used, because they have.” Robb closed with this parting shot: “If GOP backbenchers won’t revolt to bring the appropriations process back to constitutional order or to honor the principles of democratic governance, they at least ought to revolt as an act of self-respect.”