SACRAMENTO — Assembly Democrats pared a 675-page budget bill down to one sentence Tuesday in what Republicans labeled an effort to avoid exposing internal dissent.
As a result, negotiations over a spending plan moved to a bipartisan conference committee that will hammer out a final budget bill.
The unusual parliamentary move came during a day of raucous floor debate in which Republicans railed about bloated state bureaucracies, state funding for abortion and the sale of human fetuses -- and consensus on how to close a $38.2-billion shortfall continued to elude the Legislature.
Republicans made their comments on the various topics in an unsuccessful effort to tack amendments onto the budget bill that ultimately passed on a party-line vote.
At one point Assemblyman Dennis Mountjoy (R-Monrovia) -- to the confusion of some colleagues -- launched into an attack on the state government for what he alleged was the buying and selling of "baby body parts."
Mountjoy read from a list of what he said were prices for body parts collected from aborted fetuses: $600 to $900 for a brain, $500 for a "body trunk, with or without limbs."
Democrats used their majority power to quickly table the amendments proposed by Mountjoy and other Republicans. In addition to several related to abortion, the amendments included measures to close state foreign trade offices, abolish lucrative salaries for members of some state boards that meet infrequently, and allow schools to save money by contracting out for services such as transportation and landscaping.
After putting all of those amendments aside, the Assembly approved a one-line bill that said: "It is the intent of the Legislature to enact a budget for the support of state government for the 2003-04 fiscal year."
The bill bore no resemblance to the Senate version, which includes thousands of details of how and where state funds should be spent. Democratic leaders said the details were left out simply to get negotiations moving.
"Today is not the day to debate the budget," said Assembly Budget Committee Chairwoman Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach). "Today is the day to move the bill forward."
A bipartisan conference committee with six lawmakers from the Senate and Assembly begins meeting today to review every item in the budget and come up with a compromise bill. It's a task that party leaders hope will be completed by Sunday.
