The once-staid yearly process of fashioning a new state budget has evolved into a more or less perpetual crisis, sometimes because Capitol politicians have too much money to spend but more often because they face a gap between revenues and spending desires.

The stickiest aspect of the process is that a final tax-and-spending plan must pass by two-thirds votes, which gives minority Republicans rare opportunities to wield political clout.

Traditionally, the partisan fires have burned more intensely in the Assembly than in the Senate, so budget squabbles have often been resolved in the upper house first. But two years ago, when the latest budget crisis first began to emerge, the pattern was broken. Rather than forge a bipartisan deal with Republican senators, the Senate's Democratic leadership and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis adopted a pickoff strategy. With 26 Democrats in the Senate, they needed just one Republican to break ranks for a two-thirds margin. That one was Maurice Johannessen, a Redding businessman who, after leaving the Senate, was named by Davis as the state's veterans affairs secretary.
The internal dynamics of this year's budget stalemate are far different. Johannessen is gone, and the Republicans gained one Senate seat in last year's elections. That means Davis and Democrats now need at least two GOP budget votes in the Senate. Republican leader Jim Brulte is playing with a much stronger hand as he demands greater spending cuts and opposes new taxes.

Just how strong was demonstrated Tuesday, when every Republican stood with Brulte in rejecting a Democratic version of the budget that, while making billions of dollars in spending reductions, also would impose $8 billion in new taxes and fees.

Two nuggets of core truth were to be found in the thousands of words of overheated rhetoric that preceded the party-line vote. One came from Republican Sen. Jim Battin of Palm Desert, who observed bitterly that "the last couple of years the Republicans in the Senate were not in play" due to Democrats' successful overtures to Johannessen. "You will test our mettle today, and you will find it very strong," Battin warned Democrats.

The other came from the Senate's top Democrat, President Pro Tem John Burton, who said he and other Democrats were just as opposed to more spending cuts as Republicans were to new taxes. "These are core values," Burton said. "This is where we're at, and this is where we're going to stay. ... This is the best we can do. This is where we're drawing the line."

The four hours of private meetings and public debate in the Senate may have been a "drill" aimed largely at gaining media exposure with only a week remaining in the current year. But the words and the vote also indicate that the Senate, where budget compromises often have been forged in past years, is locked in partisan stalemate every bit as rigid as the Assembly. Even the least conservative of the Republican senators, Bruce McPherson of Santa Cruz, denounced the Democratic plan as "going the wrong way in both directions."

The Assembly will conduct its own drill later this week, and Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson has dispatched his lieutenants on speaking tours to bring pressure to bear on GOP lawmakers. Groups that have big stakes in the budget, such as public employee unions, are also employing advertising and other political tools to increase the pressure. But it's not likely that any of those steps will have a material effect on the situation because the Capitol's dynamics have changed dramatically.

The ranks of compromise-prone moderates have thinned, thanks to a bipartisan redistricting deal designed to maximize the number of safe seats for both parties. The Democrats are more liberal and less willing to make spending cuts while the Republicans are more conservative and less willing to entertain tax increases. A months-long effort to write a compromise budget in the Assembly wound up with the backing of just one Democrat and one Republican. While that plan makes a lot of sense, it is languishing for lack of support.

When will this budget crisis be resolved? Probably not until the state shuts down for a lack of money, and with a recent emergency loan, that's at least two months away.