You know it’s a party when the Lieutenant Governor has to admonish State Senator Derek Kilmer—not once, but twice—to settle down.

The rakish, usually quite affable, and always polite Senator Kilmer was clearly pissed last Friday as he raised his voice against the “backroom deal” that had brought a Republican budget to the floor.  It seems that Senate rules are arcane enough that a budget that no one but the writers has seen and about which there has been no public testimony can be introduced on a Friday afternoon and passed just after midnight on Saturday morning.  And Senate decorum is apparently such that saying “backroom deal” is akin to talking about somebody’s mama.

Fortunately, here at the blog we’re unconstrained by such niceties, so we can call Friday night what it was: mean.

  • $311 million more cut from food and housing assistance, as well as services for children in poverty
  • $67 million more cut from toxic cleanup of our lakes and rivers
  • $44 million more cut from K-12 classrooms
  • $41 million more cut from Disability Lifeline services for disabled adults
  • $38 million more cut from college and university students

It would, of course, be a little unfair to blame the good senators who voted for this budget, since most of them hadn’t had time to read it by the time the question was called.

The real star of Friday night’s performance was Senator Joe Zarelli, the architect and mastermind of the budget coup.  Unlike that loose cannon Senator Kilmer, Zarelli remained mindful of the bright Senate line that separates gentility from anarchy and was careful not to say what he was really thinking, which was probably something like “The good senator from the sixth can go suck an egg, because I have the votes and she doesn’t.”  Instead, he tried his best to keep the smug looks off his face as he rose to do his best Fred McMurray imitation, genially telling the angry Democrats that as soon as they calmed down he was sure everything would be O.K.  If TVW had switched to black and white while Senator Zarelli was talking it would have been just like an episode of My Three Sons.

Playing the parts of Robbie, Chip, and Ernie were nominally Democratic Senators Tim Sheldon, Jim Kastama, and Rodney Tom.  They didn’t say much, but their votes were crucial to the coup and what allowed the Republicans to crow about the “bi-partisan” vote for the budget no one had read.

Senator Tom was particularly quiet Friday night.  His support for the Zarelli budget is particularly disheartening for those of us in higher education.  We’ve always hoped that Senator Tom, as chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, would somehow see his way clear to genuinely supporting our state’s outstanding universities and colleges.  In the budget that Senate Democrats presented last week (the budget that people actually got to read and testify about), Senators Ed Murray, Lisa Brown and Derek Kilmer showed a lot of leadership and courage in finally proposing no more cuts to education.  As Senator Tom sat down with his Republican pals to write the coup budget, we would have hoped that he would have insisted, as the chair of Higher Education, that another $38 million not be cut from an already decimated system.  As the 25th and deciding vote, you’d think he could’ve gotten at least that in the deal.

Hope he got something else really good instead.