Republican Budget Blockade Day #45: Things Get Personal

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

At no point in modern history has our State Budget been held up for so long by so few people for reasons so vague, vain and valueless.  Make no mistake: the Senate Republican Budget Blockade is not a sustainable policy position -- it is an exercise of political narcissism, an incoherent temper tantrum with no clear rationale or objective but gridlock itself.

And, now, predictably, the most vulnerable pressure points within this GOP legislative jihad are starting to show. 

Take a good, hard look at this poison-tipped email sent wide by Senator Jeff Denham’s Chief of Staff Jim Kjol to the Governor’s Director of Finance Mike Genest, a highly-respected Republican, and reprinted in full by our friends at the Flash Report -- a vicious, in-your-face attack which proves the axiom that, in politics, when things start going wrong, things usually start getting personal. 

The catalyst for all this vitriol? This pointed but polite op-ed in the Modesto Bee in which Genest correctly points out that the Budget proposal on the table -- the one Denham has chosen to block -- is one of the most fiscally prudent and, yes, conservative budgets in recent memory, far more restrained and responsible than budgets Denham happily supported in prior years.

In other words, Genest did what every Finance Director has done from the genesis of time -- he defended the Governor’s budget on its merits. For this, Kjol accuses Genest of political treason -- without bothering to address or rebut any of Genest’s factual arguments.    

Folks, this is Mike Genest, the former director of the Senate Republican Fiscal Office under Senators Ross Johnson and Jim Brulte.

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