SACRAMENTO - He once tipped the scales at 369 pounds, but he's 100 pounds trimmer now.

Jim Brulte, the Senate's Republican leader, thinks that it's time for California to cinch its fiscal belt just as tight.

And what Brulte thinks matters -- a lot.

The Southern Californian -- the state's most prominent GOP elected official -- is the key to brokering a budget deal that will decide everything from how much money schools get in East San Jose to whether highways are repaired in Palo Alto. No budget can pass without Republican votes. And Republicans who vote for it will need Brulte's blessing or incur his wrath.

Last week Brulte signaled in no uncertain terms he plans to come after any Republican willing to vote for the new taxes that Davis and the Democrats want to help avoid deep cuts.

``I said something to my colleagues that I've been thinking about for a while,'' Brulte explained last week, sitting in his spacious Capitol office. ``We have a $38 billion budget deficit. We have the worst credit rating in America. That is primarily a result of the action of the governor and the Democrats who control the Legislature, along with the complicity of a couple of Republicans who in the past either thought they were smarter than all the rest of us or decided to sell the taxpayer down the road for a cabinet position.''

Last year, Maurice Johannessen, a GOP senator from Redding, broke ranks and supported the budget. Davis later appointed him secretary of veterans affairs.

If Brulte has his way, this year there won't be any rebel Republicans.

For nearly a decade, Brulte, 47, has wielded power in Sacramento. But never before have his views counted more in the behind-closed-door budget negotiations among the Big Five -- the governor and the Democratic and Republican leaders from both houses.

How things turn out will influence the drive to oust Davis from office and could revive the flagging fortunes of the state GOP by rallying anti-tax forces.

Last to leave

Brulte's often the last lawmaker to leave the Big Five meetings. The Rancho Cucamonga lawmaker jokes he stays because ``there's food left.'' But those stolen moments seem to reflect a growing rapport with the governor. He and Davis chat about their boots -- Brulte's are Tony Llama's -- and golf. They recently played together. Brulte recalls the governor edging him on the front nine and he thinks he bested the governor on the final nine holes.

When the chit-chat is over, though, the two men will need to solve the state's estimated $38.2 billion deficit. The negotiations could well boil down to who blinks first.

``Jimmy says by and large what he really believes,'' said his Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority Leader John Burton. ``I joke with him, but I can't fault a guy for what he really believes. He likes politics. He likes to be in the mix and he likes to solve problems. He just has a flawed point of view.''

As the budget negotiations begin, Brulte says he wants to improve the state's economic climate. But unlike Davis, he opposes adding a half-cent sales tax to pay off bonds that would be floated to balance the budget. ``Raising taxes in a weak economy delays expansion. It doesn't encourage expansion,'' he said.

Brulte, like Davis and Burton, is consumed by politics.

His admirers say he has moved to fill a void in the GOP leadership after the 2002 elections when for the first time in 120 years no Republican won a statewide office.

They praise Brulte's passion, citing a law he pushed that shields from prosecution desperate mothers who don't want their babies and who turn them over to hospitals rather than abandon them.

Critics, many of whom fear retribution if they talk on the record, give Brulte a mixed scorecard. They acknowledge his success in engineering the GOP takeover of the Assembly in the 1994 elections. But note that his own poor relations with several Republicans kept him from pushing aside the legendary Willie Brown. With GOP help, Brown stymied Republicans for a year.

Other Republicans say he has not grown despite his years in the GOP leadership. Last year, former Assemblyman Dick Dickerson, R-Redding, lost his bid for Johannessen's Senate seat. Brulte didn't endorse him or his GOP opponent, Dickerson recalled, saying Brulte ``was very friendly and wishing me well, but behind the scenes he was working very hard to defeat me.''

His detractors also point out that Brulte carried the 1995 energy deregulation law that had a central role in the state's spiraling electricity prices and blackouts.

``He bullied the interests who had reservations into backing off,'' said a lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Brulte, who is termed out in 2004, dismisses the criticism, saying that without the legislation the state might have been worse off. And he denies secretly opposing Dickerson.

Politics was a childhood passion for Brulte, who was born in Glen Cove, New York, and moved when he was 4 years old to Ontario with his father, an aerospace worker, and his mother, a nurse. He put up stickers for Ronald Reagan's first gubernatorial campaign in 1966.

While in college, Brulte landed an unpaid internship with then-Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, R-Calif. After he graduated from Cal Poly Pomona in 1980, Brulte felt such a strong pull for Washington that he took the only job Hayakawa had and he became the only male receptionist in the Senate.

After his father's death in 1985, Brulte returned to the Ontario area, eventually working for a Republican assemblyman, whom he succeeded in 1990. In 1996, he was elected to the Senate and became GOP leader in 2000. Last year, he took a voluntary 5 percent pay cut to $101,103 a year.

While Brulte has nearly $1 million in his campaign account and may run for the state Board of Equalization in 2006, the lawmaker says he loves being a senator and never had a desire to run for statewide office. Ever the political realist, Brulte acknowledges that it would be tough for a pragmatic conservative like him to win statewide.

``This is a state where for a Republican to win, you have to do just about everything right and you have to catch a break.''