KyKurmudgeon

Sunday’s column:

FRANKFORT — This and that as we await the real liftoff for the 2010 General Assembly, which should finally occur sometime after Tuesday’s 4 p.m. filing deadline for folks masochistic enough to want the responsibility of solving future $1.5 billion budget holes without (a) voting for expanded gambling in an election year or (b) voting for a huge tax increase in an election year:

Gov. Steve Beshear’s budget bomb landed with a thud (rhymes with dud) Tuesday night. By Wednesday, his proposal to include $780 million in revenue from racetrack slots in the two-year spending plan was the subject of considerable derision, even among House Democrats who passed a racetrack slots bill last year only to see it die in a Senate committee.

When I heard Beshear might include slots revenue in his budget plan, I must admit my initial reaction included the word “stupid.” After further reflection, though, I realized he had nothing to lose.

If he had sent lawmakers a plan based on current revenue projections, they might have passed it with few if any changes. Then, when the pain started to be felt in education, social services, Medicaid, environment protection, criminal justice and every other aspect of state government, they would be in a position to point fingers at Beshear and say, “We gave him just what he requested.”

This way, responsibility for making those cuts will rest solely with lawmakers — in a legislative election year. Beshear offered them a way out of the $780 million hole. If they choose not to take it, they — not he — will have the targets on their political backsides if a pared-down budget prompts marches on Frankfort by teachers, state workers or ordinary voters who feel the pain from lost services.

That’s really the way it should be. Governors can only propose budgets. Legislators enact them. And ever since former Gov. John Y. Brown Jr. ended the era of strong governors who sent representatives and senators their marching orders on a daily basis, budgets increasingly have become the offspring of lawmakers, carrying far more of their DNA in recent years than any governor’s.

Mind you, Beshear is hardly wearing a clean white hat here. In a way, he passed the buck. But the legislative leaders who spent the last few weeks urging him not to include slots revenue in his budget proposal were passing the buck as well. They wanted him to make the tough choices for them, so they could blame him for the consequences.

In what you might call a political game of chicken, Beshear didn’t swerve to avoid a crash. But the crash may have made him political road kill by rendering him irrelevant in the budget discussions to come.

Slots revenue will not be a part of those discussions — not unless Senate President David Williams experiences a light-in-the-road-to-Damascus conversion on the subject.

Don’t count on tax reform either. If the group of House members Speaker Greg Stumbo has working on the issue do arrive at an acceptable compromise, it’s more apt to be dealt with in a special session than in this one.

That leaves cuts and the world’s full supply of smoke and mirrors in lawmakers’ hands as they go about building a budget from scratch. Expect them to use more of the latter than the former.

One option is to craft a budget that uses the last of the stimulus money to minimize the damage in the first year — after all, it’s a legislative election year — and shove all the real pain into a second-year budget balanced with wishes, hopes and pipe dreams. Doing so would allow lawmakers to delay the serious cutting until 2011, when they can do it themselves in a non-election year for them or pass the buck back to Beshear in his own re-election year by simply authorizing him to make whatever cuts are necessary.

Hmm. The former requires lawmakers to act responsibly. The latter allows them to get even. I like the odds on the latter.

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One of the hopes some Kentucky legislators still cling to is that Congress will bail states out with another stimulus package.

If Beshear’s budget plan was “delusional,” as Rep. Mary Lou Marzian suggested, continuing to dream of another stimulus in the wake of Tuesday’s election results in Massachusetts qualifies as “delusional in the extreme.” A second stimulus package probably died when Republican Scott Brown upset Democrat Martha Coakley in the race to fill the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat.

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Those Massachusetts results represent a national example of what we have seen so often at the state level in recent years. Democrats have an infinite capacity for self-destruction.

They returned to power in Congress because voters tired of the arrogant and heavy-handed way Republicans ran things. But as soon as they took control, Democrats began displaying the same arrogant, heavy-handed ways the Republicans used. The only change was in the policy goals the ruling party pursued.

You would think one of the parties would learn from the mistakes of the other, if not from their own. Democrats didn’t learn from the Republican mistakes, and they paid the price in Massachusetts.