When it came time this week in the state Assembly for the party of fiscal responsibility and realism to stand up, it numbered just two: Assemblymen Joe Canciamilla, D-Pittsburg, and Keith Richman, R-Northridge. After months of work with a bipartisan group of colleagues, they offered a vision of what a reasonable budget compromise would look like. But they did it alone. All the others had peeled away.

It's easy to understand why some liberal Democrats might not immediately rush to embrace the plan. It hammers the poor and the programs that serve them while sparing higher-end earners who'll soon be receiving billions in federal tax cuts.

It rolls back per-capita state spending to below the level when Gray Davis became governor, and has deeper cuts than the Assembly Republican caucus has proposed. It clamps down on the future growth of spending, and provides for reform of workers' compensation and of soaring public employee pensions.

Richman calls it a "fair and balanced solution," but it's fair and balanced in the same way as Fox News. It leans so far right that the boat might capsize. It's Republican hog heaven.

And yet not a single Republican besides Richman has been willing to sign on because the plan proposes a temporary half-cent sales tax to pay off a $10.7 billion rollover of this year's debt. Republicans would apparently rather, in the pet phrase of this year's budget fight, drive California "over the cliff" than compromise in the least on taxes.

That's not politics. It's religious fanaticism.

According to the latest poll for the Public Policy Institute of California, only 18 percent of adults in the state believe there should be no increase in state taxes as part of a solution to the budget crisis. A clear majority support raising taxes by as much or more than Canciamilla and Richman propose.

But because of the state's crazy rule requiring a two-thirds majority to pass budgets, the policy preferences of 18 percent of Californians are blocking the ability of the Legislature to write a budget acceptable to the other 82 percent.

The argument for the two-thirds rule is that it promotes compromise. The reality, demonstrated this week by the Republican rejection of the Canciamilla-Richman compromise plan, is that it enables and empowers fanatics and obstructionists, and makes futile the kind of responsible leadership the two Assembly members have attempted.