Breaking News! CTA Recognizes That Republican Teachers Exist!

It's the end of June, a good time to receive the June issue of the CTA mouthpiece rag, California Educator. Let's look on page 29, and see what's going on with that most mysterious and never-seen species, the Republican Teacher:

Fed up with stonewalling by GOP leaders and the failure of the Legislature to approve tax extensions, several Republican teachers from the Central Valley turned out on June 9 to urge their lawmakers to do the right thing for schools, students and California by approving tax extensions to prevent deeper cuts to education.

The teachers, all prominent in the Republican Party and active in CTA’s Republican Caucus, particularly took aim at two local Republican legislators during a news conference at the Visalia Adult School.

I don't know how people can fall for this story line. Democrats have overwhelming majorities in both houses of the legislature and now a full-on Democrat (as opposed to a Democrat-lite) in the governor's office. How is it that Republicans are responsible for getting a budget passed on time? How is it that Republicans are preventing anything from getting done?

The answer is: they're not. The Democrats need only two Republican votes in each house of the legislature for a supermajority, and the Republicans are standing in lockstep. The Dems don't need Republican votes to pass a budget, they need 2 Republican votes to reach the 2/3 majority needed to raise taxes--this is what the Republicans are denying them. And shame on the teachers mentioned above, who are looking out for their own short-term self-interest. I look out for my own long-term self-interest as well as the state as a whole, recognizing that I won't have the retirement I've been promised if this state isn't solvent and on a strong financial footing.

How can you know what I'm telling you is true? Why should you believe what I say? What proof can I offer you? This, from the major Sacramento newspaper:

Gov. Jerry Brown said for months that he could broker a bipartisan budget deal.

By agreeing to a majority-vote budget, passed by Democrats in the Legislature on Tuesday, he conceded he could not...

"We can't sit here until we're covered in cobwebs waiting for them (Republicans) to be reasonable," Duran (the governor's spokesman) said Tuesday. "He's doing his job. He did his best to broker a bipartisan deal, but instead he had to find a way to wade through the dysfunction and get a budget on time."

Republicans are not the problem in this state.