Frankfort disgrace

This from the Courier-Journal:

Before the General Assembly adjourned Thursday, the House and Senate were brimming with lawmakers. Yesterday, the chambers were empty. The reduction in brainpower and political courage was nil.

In a disgraceful failure, the legislature was unable to reach compromise and pass a two-year state budget. That's the most important job the legislature has, and it had 60 working days in which to do it. Now Gov. Steve Beshear must call lawmakers back to Frankfort for a special session to pass a budget. That will cost $60,000 a day. If a budget isn't enacted by June 1, it could prevent the state from saving tens of millions of dollars by refinancing bonds in June.

Yes, this has happened before. The 2002 and 2004 sessions failed to pass budgets, too, and new fiscal years began under executive spending plans — the first by Gov. Paul Patton, the second by Gov. Ernie Fletcher. But since then, the Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled that a governor lacks the power even to make emergency appropriations, so a severe curtailment of state services would likely take place July 1 if no budget was in place.

It's all as unnecessary as it is grotesque.

Senate President David Williams and his lieutenants may be right that accepting the House leadership's offer of a one-year continuation budget would have run the risk of heaping particularly draconian cuts into the second year of an eventual biennial budget.

But the Senate decision followed its refusal to accept House measures to raise about $275 million through a business tax adjustment and accelerated collection of the state sales tax. Mr. Williams and crew called those steps tax increases — a finding that raises the politics of reflexively opposing all tax hikes to the level of an obsession — and made clear that even deep cuts in areas such as education and Medicaid would be preferable. How that kind of thinking best serves the long-term needs of the people of Kentucky — as opposed, say, to the short-range interests of the Republican Party — remains a mystery.

Of course, there was a better plan all along — Gov. Beshear's initial proposal to raise about $780 million through expanded gambling. But Sen. Williams — deaf to the pleas of some in his own GOP caucus and to leaders of the horse industry, many of whom are Republicans — wouldn't hear of it, and the House declined to take action without assurances that the Senate would also vote on the measure.

So there you have it. There's no budget, no blueprint for making needed cuts, no means to raise new revenue, no relief for the state's beleaguered horse industry.

But legislators can now get down to doing the one thing that really matters to them — running for re-election.