DeVore: Democrats "Playing Hardball" With State Budget Cuts

The following is second and final article featuring a transcript of a speech given by former State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore at the May general meeting of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots. He was asked to address the state of California. He also took questions.

DeVore is a candidate for the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

Below is a partial transcript.

IF THERE ARE BUDGET CUTS, WILL THERE BE OVERSIGHT? AND MIGHT THE BUDGET CUTS BE USED AS A WEAPON?

It’s going to be used as a weapon.

You saw the Senate Majority Leader Darrell Steinberg say just a few days ago that they are already drawing up a list of targeted cuts that will hit Republican districts specifically. And they have the votes to do it. So they’re playing hardball. They are going to come after Republican districts and say, “OK, you guys want to cut the budget? Guess what, you’re first.”

And that’s going to put a lot of pressure on Republican lawmakers. That’s their whole attitude.

The way the oversight works is that ideally - now I was on the budget committee for four years of my six years in Sacramento - and we have a lot of budget committee oversight, typically we got going, we’d have two a week. They’d last up to five to eight hours a day and you’re going line item through the budget ... and we’d go through things line by line. On a lot of things it was a party vote on this budget subcommittee. A few issues you could get a Democrat to come your way and see things your way. And you could trim a little bit of money here and there.

That’s the way it works ideally. That’s building up a budget from the subcommittee up. The way it’s worked in California more often than not in the last 15-20 years, is what they call the big five process - it’s an extra constitutional body (that’s) not prohibited by the Constitution, but it’s not in the Constitution. It consists of the governor and the party leaders of each house. They are the ones who iron out a lot of the budget details.

Basically what the leaders do is they say, “Well if we do this, I can’t guarantee you very many votes from my caucus,” or “If we do that, no Republican is going to vote for it.” You know that sort of thing.

And then they take the deal back to their respective caucus and they say, “This is the deal I struck. It’s the best Icould do. I really need you with me on this,” Or “They ignored me. They didn’t take any of our cuts so I want all of the Republicans to vote no.” That’s kind of how the big five process works.

At this point in time, I’m expecting that the Democrats have so many votes, and with Prop. 25 now having been passed, they don’t need a Republican to revise the budget. So they’re perfectly capable of reopening the budget and on simple majority votes, defund Republican Districts up and down the state to put pressure on them.

And I would imagine that’s their next step.

WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT THE ISSUE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS?

The challenge that we have in California is that we’re not Arizona, in that in Arizona you have a legislator and governor that are seriously grappling with this issue and trying to do things that they believe are appropriate for their state to get control of its budget and to treat its citizens and people who are there legally fairly.

The problem with California is that we’re so outnumbered in the legislature so far that any common sense reforms don’t see the light of day. Let me give you two examples from my own experience.

I had a bill when I was vice chairman of the Revenue and Taxation Committee, which would have provided a modest incentive for business to use the E-Verify system. It wasn’t mandatory. All I said was this, if you use the E-Verify system, you’re going to get a $20 credit per year for every employee on your employee payroll taxes. And if you don’t use it, we’re going to charge a fee of $20 … a quarter for every employee that that you’re not using E-Verify for. So the total delta was $100 a year per employee.

What I was trying to do was nudge employers by giving them enough incentive that would pay for their time to use the E-verify system. My rationale was the following: In 2003 the Franchise Tax Board did a study that found that 17 percent of California Social Security numbers as reported to their employers for withholding, 17 percent of those numbers were invalid. Of the 17 percent they further found that 5 percent were due to simple errors - transcription errors and cases where you had a female employee who got married and neglected to tell the social security office that her last name was different. That left 12 percent.

Now think back to the estimates of how many people were working in California in 2003 who were here in this country illegally. Most estimates you hear between 10 and 12 percent of our work force. Well 12 percent of Social Security numbers had no excuse. Some of those are going to be felons from Michigan that are trying to be under the radar. Some of them are going to be tax cheats, but the vast majority of them were illegal immigrants.

So I get the bill to my own committee, and the Democrats only argument was the following: Maybe we’ll vote for the bill because we want to see Republicans squirm when the restaurant association and the hotel association tell them not to vote for the bill because we the know Republicans really like illegal immigration because it helps their business pals with cheap labor.

And so the Democrats are thinking maybe we’ll vote for the bill just to mess with the Republicans.

Well I get my bill up and I couldn’t get a Democrat vote, not enough to get the bill out of committee. Because at the end of the day, they’re scorpions right? They want those people who are here illegally to be here because I think they see them … as poor people who are deserving of public assistance. They see those with children as future voters.

I had another bill that would have returned to the 2001 policy for our colleges and universities. Did you know, I’m sure you all do because you’re a Tea Party audience, that if you’re in California as an illegal immigrant and if you’ve attended at least three years of our public schools, in high school, that you qualify for in-state tuition at our state colleges, universities and community colleges?

Well, when this bill (providing the in-state tuition) was first put out on, I think it was 2000, did you know that (then governor) Gray Davis actually vetoed it because he said it would cost too much money. Gray Davis vetoed it because at the time the estimate was that it would cost $63 million a year.  Well the next year he signed it because he was so desperate because he knew his political career was in jeopardy and he needed to kiss up to the powers that be in the legislature. The Latino caucus in the legislature is very powerful. So he signed the bill.

The yearly cost now, it was $63 million in 2001, I had an audit request … and now the yearly cost is $147 million a year. So it’s more than doubled.

Now here’s the irony. You know who uses the benefit the most at our UC system and Cal State system? Immigrants from Asia; illegal immigrants from Asia.

Now the community college system, that’s where you get most of the illegal immigrants from south of the border. But the majority of the cost is actually linked to the Cal State and the UC system and it’s actually people from Taiwan and South Korea who are using that benefit.

I had a bill that said let’s give $3 million to the National Guard so they could attend our colleges and universities for free. Because we are the only state in the union that doesn’t do that for our National Guardsmen. California is the only state. And I put the bill in and said, “OK we’re going to get rid of it for the illegal immigrants and we’re going to give it to the National Guard so we save $147 million over here and we spend $3 million over here. That saves the budget $144 million. Isn’t this great?”

And what the Democrats did for my first hearing is they trotted out all these students who were here illegally crying in the microphone. “You hate us. You’re taking away our education. This is our right. We need to be educated. We can be productive citizens.” And I’m thinking to myself, productive? As soon as you graduate, you could be deported. Why am I spending my tax dollars on you?

And so they came up and testified. The Democrats stripped the language from my bill, hostile amendment, stripped the language that ended the program for illegal immigrants. Then my bill cost $3 million cause it only helped the guard.

By the way, I tried that bill several times in the past and every time it was shot down in appropriations because they said, “Oh we can’t afford it.” So that’s what happened. They passed the bill out of committee without the savings. We went to appropriations: “We can’t afford it.” It was shot down.

The point of telling those stories is that California is, I don’t want to say the word gone, because there are so many things that I think we can tilt and get this state back in our favor because of the fiscal chaos, because of the unemployment. But until we get the legislature with a few more conservative minded people in it, we’re not going to make progress on these bills. It is an impossible task. You cannot do it until we change our numbers in the legislature. It is possible. You have to believe it’s possible otherwise you go crazy and you move to Texas, which is sounding more and more interesting every day.

IN RESPONSE TO A QUESTION ON HOW THE MAJORITY OF EDUCATION FUNDING CAN BE KEPT FOR THE CLASSROOM AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT THE BUREAUCRACY THAT SURROUNDS THE SCHOOLS

We have one success story in California, and that’s the charter school system. Charter schools have been growing at a much quicker rate in California than they have nationally. Now, that has caused charter schools to get in the crosshairs of the teachers union in Sacramento. And what’s been happening, and thankfully Governor Schwarzenegger did veto almost all the legislation that targeted charter schools. But what’s happened is that we’ve gotten more and more and more (charter schools).

I think they’re up to 6 percent market share in California right now, which is pretty remarkable given how few there were 10 years ago. So what’s been happening is, as charter schools have been growing and more and more students have been going to them, the teacher’s union has been proposing bill after bill after bill to put charter schools under the same rules and restrictions as the regular schools, thus to destroy what makes them unique.

And this is, of course, done on purpose because they can’t stand the competition. So we have to protect the charter school system because they are working, they are more efficient and they are, on balance, producing better results for our children and it gives some competition and some choice. And we need that in California. We need it desperately.

But in-so-far as proposals, I can guarantee you that everyone of your local lawmakers who isn’t a Democrat has at least one bill that is a reform bill that would be a great idea that isn’t even going to see the first three minutes of the hearing because, what happens in Sacramento, you think that a bill would have a fair hearing? No.

If it’s a bill that the teacher’s union says no to, you’ll get up, the chair will yawn. The chair will look at their watch, they’ll walk out of the hearing room, they’ll step back in. Ninety seconds later, bang the gavel and they ask “Are you done?”

Ha. Then they call for a vote and it’s a party line vote. So until you’ve actually been in Sacramento, you have no concept of how stacked the deck is against any common sense conservative idea.

Which is why sadly I think our state, just like a drug addict, needs to hit rock bottom before we can recover. And we haven’t hit rock bottom yet. I know it seems like it, but we haven’t.

There are still some accounting tricks left up their collective sleeves in Sacramento.