On Background:

Here They Go Again

By Dick Pettys
InsiderAdvantage Georgia

(3/17/08) Well, here they go again. It’s late in the legislative session, neither of the two budgets has been finalized and there’s a big fight brewing between the House and the governor over tax cuts, with the Senate - as has become the norm - coming down on the governor’s side.

It’s beginning to look a lot like 2007 again, although no one has yet accused anyone else of showing his backside. (Be patient. That could happen. The Speaker already has come close to calling the governor a hypocrite over yet another hot-button issue - Sunday alcohol sales.)

Of course, 2008 is the second year of the two-year term than began in 2007, so the takeaway is that three-quarters of the way through this legislative session, we really haven't moved on at all from the chaos of last year; we're still seeing the same battles of 2007 being fought and re-fought. Often, with similar rhetoric and similar moves.

For example: just last week in denouncing the House-passed tag tax cut, Gov. Sonny Perdue had this to say: “This is major tax policy of the state done on the fly in the Rules Committee on a supplemental calendar on the last day (for bills to cross the halls).”

Now consider what he said last year about the $142 million tax break lawmakers inserted in the midyear budget bill: “...the wrong choice in the midst of panic in the dark of the night in a secret room.”

(As a result of that battle, Perdue vetoed the entire midyear budget on the next-to-last day of last year’s session, prompting an override vote in an angry House the next day. But it takes two houses to dance, and the Senate refused to take up the override motion. After lawmakers had gone home, and after toying with the idea of calling them back for a special session Perdue ultimately rescinded his budget veto but line-itemed out the tax cut.)

And there's this:

Last year, Perdue took particular notice of the fact that the $142 million tax cut proposed by House leaders was exactly the same size as the senior tax cut he proposed (and which he wasn’t able to get passed.)

This year, House leaders took particular notice that Perdue’s reduction of $65 million in his revenue estimate for the current midyear budget is exactly the right size to take out a couple of key things they want to do, including restoring money that he’s cut out of the educational equalization formula. (It's particularly galling to him that his own Republicans should try to do this, since this is the very issue Democrats tried to use against him in his 2006 re-election campaign.)

This protracted fight over taxing and spending goes much deeper than a mere philosophical difference over government policy. It’s about power and grievances (real or imagined) and, naturally, there’s a good bit of ego involved in it, as there is in anything that happens under the Gold Dome. And it’s all the more surprising because Republicans spent decades railing against Democrats for some of these same kinds of things, and vowed they would be different when they finally got control.

Here's the difference. Democrats had been in power so long they weren't constantly testing the powers of the legislative branch versus the executive branch, and on those occasions when there was a dustup, they tried to keep it as private as possible. After five years, Republicans still are having to find out for themselves exactly how far the limits of their power extend until they run into somebody else’s fist, and the struggle already has become so public it's going to be tough to put that genie back into the bottle.

Looking ahead, there are some interesting questions to be answered as this contest teeters to an uncertain close. You will recall it was tough enough for Speaker Glenn Richardson to get the tax bill out of his own chamber. Now the ball has bounced into the Senate's court and attention will fall on Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle.

Cagle has been far friendlier to the governor than has Richardson (Perdue's one-time floor leader) in the House, and late last week he offered Perdue some serious help in blocking the House-passed tag tax cut. After Perdue denounced it as political pandering, Cagle, too, jumped on the measure, saying it’s not the right relief at the right time and that he will offer a counter-proposal.

That should have helped ease Perdue's heartburn some, since the governor has no power over a constitutional amendment once it passes both chambers - he doesn't need to sign it and cannot veto it.

But is that a risky political move for Cagle?

House passage of the measure created a torrent of news reports that may well have created some public expectation that the hated tag tax is being abolished. And last weekend, House members were going around to the GOP county conventions with stickers which read "Axe The Birthday Tax" printed on them - an effort to further ramp up expectations.

To those who don't like the tax because of the $672 million hole in local government treasuries that the state would have to fill, blocking the bill wouldn't be risky at all. But then others argue that government already is too fat and could handle the cost merely by tightening its belt. Perdue isn't one of those. He argued last week that Georgians already know he's cut a good bit of the fat out of state government.

And what is the alternative plan that Cagle plans to offer? Senate sources said he’s looking at raising the standard deduction on the state income tax, starting at the lowest end of the scale to give those in low income tax brackets the biggest break. But until he rolls out his plan, it’s too early to say how that might go over with the public compared to axing the tag tax. And, it's probably harder to explain on a bumper sticker.

And then there's this: from what we can tell, axing the car tax isn't necessarily an unpopular idea with rank-and-file Senate Republicans. How much political capital will Cagle have to expend within his own Caucus to block the tag tax and offer something new?

That's hard to forecast, too. Up to now, the Senate's been running smoothly and the freshman lieutenant governor has enjoyed an extended honeymoon in the chamber. But there was an unusual development last week that bears watching.

During the debate over a red-light cameras bill, the normally jovial lieutenant governor tensed-up, swatted down amendments right and left as non-germane, and scolded a number of senators by name for offering them. Majority Leader Tommie Williams quickly moved to table the bill, a move we're told was done to prevent a potentially embarrassing floor fight over whether the amendments were germane or not.

There are a lot of moving pieces and its hard to say just how his will all play out. Stay tuned.

Dick Pettys, editor of InsiderAdvantage Georgia, was Georgia capitol correspondent for The Associated Press for 35 years. He can be reached at 404 230 8930 or at dpettys@insideradvantage.com