What Was Going On Over At The Hyatt

Eric Zimmerman covers Republicans vs. reality:

A 12-foot inflatable ATM machine sat outside the Sacramento Hyatt this past weekend, emblazoned with the words "California Taxpayers--Already Taxed To The Max!" The display was one of many illustrations of the anger of delegates here at the California Republican Convention, which met just days after a handful of Republicans in the state legislature broke party ranks to vote for a budget that included $12 billion in new taxes. Facing a $42-billion deficit and unable to carry any debt over to next year due to California's balanced-budget requirement, the legislature conducted agonizing negotiations for months past its official deadline; breaking even without some kind of tax increases, it became clear, would have required drastic cuts to government programs. But activists at the convention didn't want to hear any excuses. "We need to send a message," said Mike Gomez, Solano County GOP chairman. "When you violate our core principles, you're going to have a problem."

Jon Fleischman, the southern vice-chair of the state party and publisher of the popular conservative blog Flashreport.com, spent the convention shepherding through a resolution to punish the GOP Judases. "At the end of the day, the party needs to be able to enforce discipline, or everybody just does what they want," he told me, hurrying through the Hyatt lobby between meetings.

...The grassroots rage seems unconcerned with the actual challenges involved in the budget negotiations. The general fund over which the legislature has discretionary authority totals around $100 billion, meaning members would have had to immediately eliminate 40 percent of spending to avoid tax increases. Was this possible? "I always submitted that there was a way," Republican State Senator Tom Harman told me just before addressing a lunchtime audience. "But there was never any serious discussion of that." Others simply wanted to push the economic crisis to the brink as a test of political will. "I'd kind of liked to see how far it would have gone," said Paul Smith, a former Congressional candidate from the Sacramento area.

...Like the national party, California Republicans are finding it easier to hunker down in their ideological bunkers than reach cross the aisle. The trend is making it harder for any moderate Republicans in California to work with Democrats--and the more cohesive conservatives become, the more strongly they react to betrayal. State Senator Abel Maldonado--who even got Democrats to agree to place an open-primary referendum on the ballot in exchange for his vote--faced opponents at the conference gathering support for a special election to remove him from office. Speakers like Congressman Darrell Issa took open shots at him, and Fleischman called him out by name in front of a crowd of delegates. But Maldonado knew there was no other option. "Republicans couldn't come up with $42 billion worth of cuts," he said. "Nobody wants to decimate public education, decimate healthcare, decimate the environment, decimate transportation." But Maldonado also knows the party doesn't care for his reasoning anymore.