Skinny

From our Do As I Say, Not As I Do Files, we all know that Republicans are the ones that were pushing for rollbacks of public employee pensions, right? We know it was the Republicans who talked ad nauseum about 1999’s SB 400 which increased pension benefits legislatively, and it was the fiscally prudent Republicans that wanted those egregious new benefits repealed. So imagine our surprise when we looked over the final vote for SB 6X 22, the bill that did, in fact, roll back those 1999 benefits. That bill was scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 10. But that would have required a two-thirds vote. As it turned out, six of the 15 Republicans in the Senate refused to vote for those rollbacks. Why, you ask? Because the prison guards union asked them not to. Sam Blakeslee, Dave Cogdill, Jeff Denham, Bob Dutton and George Runner were the five Republicans who voted against the bill. Sam Aanestad cast a courageous abstention on the measure. To be fair, four Democrats voted against the bill (Gil Cedillo, Ron Calderon, Ellen Corbett and Leland Yee) and three Democrats present refused to vote either way (Lou Correa, Gloria Negrete McLeod and Alex Padilla). But let the record show that when those pension benefits were eventually rolled back, it was the votes of 15 Democrats and seven Republicans in the Senate who were able to buck their union buddies.