Lead, compromise, go home

Published 3:19 pm Monday, March 5, 2012

To hear the protestations of Senate Democrats, you’d think democracy itself had been defiled Friday night in Olympia.

Hardly. The majority party simply got outmaneuvered. It’s understandable that they were smarting, but in reality, they only had themselves to blame.

The rare procedural move employed Friday night by Senate Republicans was well within the rules. And it was only possible because Democrats, who hold a 27-22 edge in the Senate, had put forth a budget that couldn’t garner the minimum 25 votes needed for passage. So Republicans, who had convinced three conservative-leaning Democrats to join them, managed to get their own budget to the floor, where it passed without a vote to spare.

What that action produced is not crisis. It’s a new starting point for negotiations with the House and the governor’s office. It will end, as democratic disputes are supposed to, in a compromise.

Now what’s needed is for adults to act as such. Budget negotiators from each party in each chamber should do their level best to get past the political turmoil, make a deal and adjourn. That might take longer than the three days left in the current session, but it shouldn’t take much longer.

If Gov. Chris Gregoire is forced to call a special session, she should keep the pressure on by having it start right away. As she has argued repeatedly, and correctly, the longer decisions are delayed, the more the budget gap grows.

Neither the budget passed by House Democrats nor the one written by Senate Republicans passes any fiscal purity test. Democrats use an accounting gimmick, delaying a $406 million payment to school districts into the next budget cycle, to avoid deeper cuts. Republicans employ gimmicks of their own, delaying a pension payment of $133 million and shifting dedicated money from public works accounts into the general fund.

With bipartisan consensus that gimmickry will be part of the final solution, they should compromise on the gimmicks, implement some key reforms demanded by a majority of senators, do the least harm possible to education, and go home.

Both sides have plenty of incentive to get done quickly. It’s an election year, and state elected officials are prohibited from raising campaign money while the Legislature is in session. Of particular importance to Republicans, their candidate for governor, Attorney General Rob McKenna, stands to lose fund-raising ground to his Democrat opponent, Jay Inslee.

This doesn’t need to drag out. The legislative process isn’t often pretty, but it works when leaders act like leaders.