Over the past few weeks, I've been chronicling the growing fight in Sacramento over the fact that California state legislators don't release their official budgets for public scrutiny. This showdown started when Anthony Portantino, a Democrat from La Canada Flintridge (an affluent part of Los Angeles County) went rogue and made his budget public to prove that it had been slashed by Assembly Speaker John Perez as punishment for Portantino's refusal to support the Democratic budget.
The latest twist in the story is that Assembly Republicans are starting to pile on, with four freshmen (Tim Donnelly, Shannon Grove, Allan Mansoor, and Kristen Olsen) now unilaterally releasing their budget documents, despite official policy being that they are secret. The GOP Caucus in the lower chamber is also calling for all of the documents to be made public. Speaker Perez, in the meantime, is creating a task force on legislative secrecy. That old trick -- deferral by commission -- is unlikely to work, however, given just how rapidly this fight is escalating.
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