John A. Pérez was sworn in Monday as the California Assembly’s 68th speaker. He offered a good speech, promising to limit special-interest influence and return to a more transparent process of approving the state budget. <\/p>\n
“I’ve already announced that the budget will not be written behind closed doors in Big 5 meetings,” Pérez said Monday. “A full Budget Committee and subcommittee process will ensure all members get to participate”<\/p>\n
Pérez is in his honeymoon period, so we will grant him a few months to deliver on the goods. It could well be that his commitment to open government will withstand the test of time. <\/p>\n
Yet as Pérez well knows, some of his predecessors made similar promises, only to betray the public with backroom budget deals in the dead of night. <\/p>\n
So far, the signs are less than encouraging that Pérez will stray far from the pack. <\/p>\n
Despite claims of wanting to work with the GOP, Pérez voted against state Sen. Abel Maldonado in his bid for lieutenant governor. He wants to ban lobbyists from texting lawmakers on the Assembly floor, but has no trouble schmoozing with them otherwise. (Hours after his speech, he had a fundraiser scheduled at the Citizen Hotel.) <\/p>\n
Pérez can strike all the right notes about “the people’s house,” etc., but his main goal as speaker will be to raise money for his party and keep its majority in the Assembly. Everything he does will be viewed through that prism.<\/p>\n
It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Pérez. Because of term limits, the Assembly is effectively forced to place a rookie in the role of speaker. Fabian Núñez was in such a position, and just as he was building strength as a speaker and scoring some legislative accomplishments, his term was up. He was out of a job.<\/p>\n
Pérez’s challenge will be to build strength quickly without abusing it, while showing he takes orders from no one. <\/p>\n
In an adjoining editorial, we’ve urged Democrats to use their leverage with state employee unions to seek a negotiated resolution to the furlough fight. If Pérez were to use his position in such a way, it would be a sign of good things to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John A. Pérez was sworn in Monday as the California Assembly’s 68th speaker. He offered a good speech, promising to limit special-interest influence and return to a more transparent process of approving the state budget. “I’ve already announced that the budget will not be written behind closed doors in Big 5 meetings,” Pérez said Monday. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}