A sultry summer heat wave has enveloped the California Capitol, the sort of weather that makes folks a little testy. And that's inside the building.

A political showdown on the state's worst-ever budget crisis is drawing near. As early as next week, the state Senate may take up a compromise, no-new-taxes budget that, if enacted, would be a tactical victory for the Legislature's minority Republicans and a big setback for its majority Democrats.

State election officials, meanwhile, were preparing to to declare that enough voters' signatures have been obtained to force Gray Davis, the most unpopular governor in recorded California history, to face a recall election, possibly as soon as late September.

The budget crisis and the looming recall have created an atmosphere of anticipatory anxiety among political types who hate uncertainty and wish that they were taking their customary summer vacation break. No one knows what's going to happen on either front, but there's a growing sense within the Capitol that whatever happens, it could affect political careers and interest groups' legislative agendas for years to come.

Politicians always try to effect public serenity, but their growing anxiety was revealed in a private meeting of liberal Assembly members Monday that, unbeknownst to them, was broadcast over the Capitol's internal system of "squawk boxes" and was, in part, tape-recorded by Republican staffers.

The liberals were worried that the budget compromise being cooked up in the Senate would call for more than a billion dollars of additional spending cuts while avoiding the new taxes that Democrats espouse and were meeting to discuss whether to accept the deal in the face of adamant Republican opposition to new taxes, or hold out. A couple of them suggested that continuing the budget stalemate might help Davis stave off the recall and/or make it easier to pass a ballot measure to reduce the voting margin on budgets and eliminate Republican influence.

Republicans gleefully distributed partial transcripts of the meeting to reporters and seized upon the words as "proof" that Democrats were the main impediments to a new budget -- rhetorical payback for weeks of Democratic accusations about Republican intransigence.

"I was stunned," Republican budget negotiator John Campbell insisted at a Capitol news conference. "My jaw was on the ground as I heard what went on in that meeting."

As Campbell left the news conference, he was accosted by a finger-wagging Steve Peace, Davis' budget director, who accused Campbell of making much too much of "fringe Democrats having goofy conversations." The mercurial Peace, a former legislator himself, then staged an impromptu, if characteristic, news conference in which he more or less denounced everyone in the Legislature for failing to produce a budget. "I'm embarrassed (and) much of the Legislature ought to be embarrassed," Peace railed. "I've watched this place deteriorate over the years into rank extremism. ... "

Those incidents forced Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, the top Democrat, to appear before reporters himself, dismiss the tape-recorded meeting of liberals as "a bull session" and insist that the participants "are not goofy."

The great goofiness debate underscored what has become a major factor in the crisis: Republicans are, for a change, disciplined in their opposition to new taxes while Democrats are all over the map and Davis is increasingly desperate to have anything labeled "budget" enacted to cool the recall fervor. Recall proponents have accused Davis of mismanaging the state's finances and then concealing the extent of the deficit when he was running for re-election last year.

Democrats, too, don't know what to make of the recall, torn between lining up behind Davis to beat back the effort to dump him and offering a plausible alternative to keep the governorship in Democratic hands should the recall succeed. The liberals who were meeting Monday know that should a Republican replace Davis, it would be the death knell for their legislative agenda for at least three years. Not knowing what will happen, or how their party should react to the recall challenge, makes them very testy. And the hot, muggy weather outside the Capitol just makes things worse.