- Sen. Lisa Brown
"We’re in the final throes," Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown said today as she took a break from budget wrangling to chat with reporters. "We could be done next week."
Aside from one loud rejection of the budget she's put forward, Brown says she's getting good feedback. “We feel good about the budget proposal," she told reporters. "We think that it was a good move to draw the line on further cuts to education.”
What about the house Democrats' move to get budget savings by forcing rural counties (whose voters keep saying they want to cut government) to pay for their own damn social services?
“We’ve heard overwhelmingly that local governments prefer our approach," Brown said.
Well, of course they prefer the senate Democrats' approach. It essentially gives them state services for free by charging those services to urban taxpayers. But is it worth pushing the house Dems' idea forward this year, just to show rural voters what their demands for smaller government really mean?
“I don’t blame rural Washington for putting us in this budget hole," Brown said. “I think our budget problem is largely a factor of the global economy... I don’t see it as an east-side vs. the west side issue.”
