SACRAMENTO -- When state Sen. Bob Margett walks among the manufacturers and dairy farmers of his conservative district, he says, "it's all attaboys" for his part in the seven-week budget stalemate that has paralyzed much of state government.
" 'Bob, . . . thank God for the Senate,' " the Arcadia lawmaker recalled hearing time and again. "I'm getting all these attaboys to hang in there, and that's my constituency. I don't have a single vote in San Francisco."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, August 22, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part Page News Desk 1 inches; 30 words Type of Material: Correction
Budget fight: A photo caption accompanying an article in Saturday's California section about Republican holdouts on the state budget misidentified state Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth (R-Murrieta) as Sen. Dave Cogdill (R-Modesto).
Nor is he beholden to voters in other largely Democratic urban areas. Margett and 13 GOP colleagues in the Senate represent a minority of Californians, mostly in rural towns, yet by banding together to withhold the one vote still needed, they have stretched the budget deadlock to 48 days.
Outnumbered by Democrats, they have spent careers watching the promulgation of social and fiscal policies they abhor -- on matters from abortion to the environment -- while legislation they hold dear is relegated to the recycling bin. Because the budget is among the few types of legislation that can't pass without minority support, the annual spending battle allows them a rare chance to exercise influence.
For instance, state Sen. Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield, a slim, salt-and-pepper-haired man who represents growers in the Central Valley, has some demands. One of them is a bill to curb the power of Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, to file lawsuits that could hold up proposals from last year's $40-billion infrastructure bond act on the grounds that they could worsen global warming.
"If we don't keep faith with the public and build these bridges and roads and highways and fix the water system and build these schools like we told the public we were going to do -- if instead we squander that away in lawsuits -- that is just wrong, and I'm not going to be a part of it," said Ashburn, 53, in an interview last week.
A proud conservative who lost a congressional bid three years ago, Ashburn made a name for himself as a Kern County supervisor fighting to remove a desert squirrel from the state's endangered species list because limitations on property owners in the squirrel's name were "terrorizing" his constituents.
Ashburn remained unswayed on the budget when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow Republican who has moved to the political center, promised to veto $700 million in spending if the senators would go along. Ashburn called $150 million of Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts "phony" and "an accounting gimmick."
