It's July, and once again California doesn't have a state budget. To judge by our mail and calls, a lot of citizens are hopping mad about it. To all those who are angry, here's some advice: Hold onto that emotion for the election next March, when you'll actually have a chance to do something about it.

Done that? Good. Now put the anger aside for a moment of reflection. At whom or what, exactly, should our anger be righteously directed for the failure to have an on-time budget in this year when California finances are so fragile?

At Gov. Gray Davis? As the top guy, he's always a good target. But it's hard to lay all the blame at his feet. Governors propose budgets but they don't get to pass them. That's the Legislature's job.
In January, Davis proposed as close to a balanced budget as anyone has seen this year, a fiscally responsible document full of tough spending cuts and tax increases. Almost everyone in the Legislature hated it, as did most Californians. You can blame Davis for not having tried harder to sell his budget -- and we do -- but probably not even professor Harold Hill could have sold that much pain.

So let's be angry instead at legislative Democrats. They control the Legislature, with majorities in both houses. Why haven't they passed a budget? The answer is, they would have if they could. But they can't. They may pass laws that transform daily life in the state, but they can't pass a budget without a two-thirds vote. And Democrats don't hold two-thirds of the seats.

The same applies to legislative Republicans. As the minority party, they can't pass a budget, only block one. Which is what they're doing. You can be angry at them -- not many Californians think that avoiding any tax increase, however small and temporary, is worth shutting 110,000 kids out of kindergarten and closing a couple of university campuses, as Assembly Republicans proposed Monday. But how can voters hold them any more accountable than by making them a vanishing minority in state politics, with no statewide officeholders?

So where should our anger be directed? We can be angry with everybody in the state Capitol for having failed to come up with a timely compromise. But there's not much logic in that. Are we supposed to elect someone to the Legislature who represents our views and then get angry with him or her for standing up for those values? When everyone is to blame, no one is.

And that's the problem: The two-thirds rule creates a system designed to produce a late budget, and usually an irresponsible one, but leaves no one accountable for the failure. It undermines democracy.

As Peter Schrag points out on the opposite page today, voters will likely have a chance to remedy this system failure next year by passing the Budget Accountability Act, which ends the two-thirds rule. So hold that anger. If we citizens fail to change the system, we'll have only ourselves to blame.