Bush Administration to California: Drop Dead!

By: Peter Schrag

During the recession of the early 1990's, California Gov. Pete Wilson relentlessly attacked President Clinton's administration for failing to pay its share of the state's costs for services to illegal immigrants. Eventually, he succeeded in getting Congress and the White House to pass SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which last year provided California $237 million to help pay for some 25,000 illegal aliens in California's prisons. That's 42% of the entire SCAAP program.

Now President Bush plans to kill it. In his new budget, SCAAP gets the ax. It's a strange move for an administration that ranks homeland security among its chief priorities in the post-Sept. 11 era.

But it's hardly surprising. For this administration, stiffing California has become almost reflexive. From its treatment of California during last year's energy crisis to NASA's announcement early this month that it will move all modification work on the space shuttle from Palmdale to Florida, at a cost of some 300 high-wage California jobs, the administration seems to be making California pay for its overwhelming support for Al Gore in the 2000 election.

The primary aim, of course, isn't punishment. It's simple politics. NASA says the shuttle decision was economically sensible, but that's a dubious claim. Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, who has long fought to keep the work in his district, said the move is "penny-wise but pound foolish... NASA will lose the institutional memory of an experienced work force that cannot be replaced by training".

But Florida is a swing state that Bush won (maybe) by a hair. Shoring up support there for 2004 seems to be more important to Bush's political strategists than wooing a state that they aren't sure they can carry. They also appear to be more concerned with Bush's own re-election than with retaining control of the House this November or recapturing the Senate. And they certainly don't want to help Gov. Gray Davis.

Not that the Bushies were the first to stiff the Golden State. Ever since the late 1980's, California has been what Tim Ransdell, director of the nonpartisan, Washington-based California Institute for Federal Policy Research, calls a "donor state", meaning that we send far more to Washington in taxes - this year some $30 billion more - than we get back in federal programs and contracts.

In part, the imbalance of payments is merely a consequence of the state's relative affluence and thus its high federal tax collections. But it also reflects what Ransdell calls Washington's ABC - Anywhere But California - attitude.

In the early 1980's, we got a little more from Washington than we sent. But with the reduction in defense contracts, that ended by 1986. Ever since, we've paid far more than has come back.

California has by far the largest congressional delegation, which seems to be working more harmoniously on common concerns than it once did. But it hasn't been able to break a long string of unfavorable federal funding formulas protected by senators from small states and states in the Northeast and Midwest with declining populations.

But what's happened in the past year goes far beyond ABC. It seems to indicate an almost gleeful stick-it-to-California attitude.

There were, to begin with, Vice President Dick Cheney's serves-'em-right remarks last year that, in effect, blamed the California energy crisis entirely on the state and declared the feds weren't going to do anything to help. If California's eco-nuts hadn't banked on trendy things such as conservation, there would have been no power shortage. Let 'em freeze in the dark.

Of course it was partly California's fault, but as becomes clearer every day, price manipulation by Cheney's Texas energy industry cronies - the same guys who helped draft the Bush energy plan - seemed to have had as much to do with it as California did. Once the Democrats took control of the Senate last June, California energy prices miraculously dropped almost as fast as Enron's stock would six months later.

There's more. There was the rejection of California's request for a waiver from the federal rule that gasoline include ethanol, even though California's reformulated gas may well be better for the environment than gas with an oxygenate such as ethanol. That'll cost Californians both at the pump and in the loss of federal highway funds. This one is a gift to Midwest corn farmers and Archer Daniels Midland, the largest marketer of ethanol and a lavish influence buyer in Washington.

There's Bush's proposed cut in the Medicaid payment formula that will cost California $300 million, far more per Medicaid patient than in any other state. There are the raids on the cannabis buyers clubs that provide medical marijuana under the provisions of Proposition 215, which legalized medical pot use in California. There is the administration's push to resume exploratory oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. It's a long list.

Cheney is in California this week to prove the administration really cares. Good luck.