Limited No Government

There's a famous quote of anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist in which he says: "Our goal is to shrink government down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."

The dysfunctional state of California is very close to achieving that goal.

Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers scrambled Wednesday to avert a financial meltdown, and public officials across California braced for annihilating cuts on the day after voters trounced their leaders' rescue plan for the state.

Within two hours of returning from Washington, D.C., the governor huddled behind closed doors with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders to grapple with a projected $21.3-billion budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year and stop state government from running out of money by July.
[...]
Schwarzenegger, who alienated himself from fellow Republicans in February by reversing his pledge not to raise taxes, took the results as a mandate for the plan he unveiled last week to slash billions from education, healthcare, law enforcement and social programs, and to borrow $2 billion from local governments.
[...]
There was a sense that the warnings this time, unlike some earlier ones, were real -- that state officials had no options left but to deliver devastating cuts that could force Californians to reconcile the desire for programs they have routinely approved by initiative with an insistence on limiting taxes.

"People are going to have to figure out: Do they want schools, do they want roads, do they want public safety, do they want to take care of the less fortunate?" said John Burton, a former state Senate leader who is now chairman of the California Democratic Party. "At some point, that's going to happen."

And this in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. Thanks to a voter-approved consitutional requirement that any tax increases require a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature, combined with the California Republican Party's zero-tolerance policy on taxes increases, you need a better than two-to-one advantage to get anything done around here.