Daniel Weintraub: Walking the line of mainstream California
Sacramento Bee
October 21, 2007

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this month signed new laws to put the state in your car, your gun closet, your children's toy chest, even your bathroom, prompting howls from conservatives who say there is no longer any doubt that the Republican governor has abandoned the cause of limited government.

At the same time, however, Schwarzenegger vetoed 16 of 18 bills opposed by two major business groups, suggesting that he remains the economic conservative he has always claimed to be.

Which is it?

As usual with this governor, it's a little bit of both.

On most big-ticket, statewide issues that the mainstream business community thinks will dampen economic growth, Schwarzenegger remains a conservative. The two most notable exceptions to that rule are global warming and health care, where the governor favors a more aggressive role for government than his business supporters would prefer. But even there, he has pushed to preserve more of a market orientation than the Democrats who control the Legislature support.

On issues that are more important to ideological conservatives than conservative business leaders, however, Schwarzenegger continues to test the limits of centrism. Each year, the "social moderate" and "environmental progressive" parts of his political personality seem to become more pronounced at the expense of the libertarian leanings upon which he once prided himself.

His performance on hundreds of bills sent to his desk at the end of this year's legislative session illustrates both trends.

FlashReport.org, a Web site that has become the go-to Internet place for conservative Republicans in California, listed 19 bills it described as the "worst of the worst" and called on the governor to veto them all. In the end, he vetoed only 11 of the 19, signing eight, and the site promptly gave him a grade of "F" for his lack of fealty to conservative principles.

"He has shifted from someone who was on the stump protecting individual liberty to someone who is clearly very comfortable injecting government into the lives of Californians," Jon Fleischman, the Web site's publisher and a Republican Party official, told me last week.

Among the bills on the list that Schwarzenegger signed were a measure to ban smoking in cars with children, another to prohibit the use of a controversial chemical in the manufacture of toys sold in the state and a third to reduce the amount of water used in toilets installed here. He also signed two flood-control bills the group opposed and two bills involving guns – one requiring handguns to "micro-stamp" the ammunition they fire to make it easier to trace bullets and another to limit the use of lead bullets to help preserve the endangered California condor.

Where are the limits of Schwarzenegger's social liberalism? He vetoed a bill that would have required parents to use car seats for children until they were 8 years old, and another that would have required restaurants to put nutrition information on their menus. He also rejected a measure that would have given college financial aid to illegal immigrant children who graduate from California high schools.

The governor's handling of eight bills advocated by the gay rights lobby is also instructive. He vetoed their top priority, a measure to allow gay marriage, saying that a voter-imposed ban on same-sex unions could be overturned only by another vote of the people or by a court order. But he signed the seven other bills, including measures making it easier for domestic partners to change their names and file joint tax returns, and two measures aimed at fighting discrimination against gays and transgender individuals in government and schools.

One of those measures was the top veto target of a Christian conservative group, the Capitol Resource Institute, which claims that the bill could lead to a ban on the words "mom" and "dad" in school textbooks and give teenage boys who are unsure of their gender access to girls' locker rooms. The group is threatening to mount a referendum to place a measure on the ballot that would block the new law from taking effect.

"Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrates the negative consequences of electing a liberal Republican to office," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families. "Schwarzenegger fooled many California conservatives into voting for him. Yet now he's flip-flopped and stabbed them in the back."

But while social conservatives were labeling the governor an ideological traitor, the economic conservatives over at the California Chamber of Commerce were thrilled when the governor vetoed all 12 of the "job-killer" bills the business lobby asked him to reject.

Those measures included a measure requiring all businesses to insure their workers or else pay a fee equal to 7.5 percent of their payroll, another to force employers to pay striking employees during a lock-out and a third that would have ended the right of farm workers to a secret ballot when deciding whether or not to join a union. Other bills the governor vetoed would have placed into state law versions of two of his environmental policies, one involving "green buildings" and the other the carbon content of fuel, but with twists that would have limited flexibility for business upon which the governor has insisted.

"The governor continues to veto bills that would have placed California's competitiveness in peril," Allan Zaremberg, the chamber's president, said in a statement. "If these 'job-killers' had been signed into law, small and large employers throughout the state would be feeling the pain."

Schwarzenegger also vetoed five of seven bills targeted by the California Taxpayer Association, including one that overlapped with the Chamber of Commerce's list of top priorities. One of the bills on the taxpayer association list that he signed will allow counties to impose a $1 per page fee on recorded documents to pay for a program to redact Social Security numbers from public records. The other requires the Public Utilities Commission to establish a new gas utility charge to fund a 10-year, $250 million program to encourage the installation of solar water heaters.

That bill was a favorite of Sierra Club California, which highlighted 24 bills the environmental group wanted the governor to sign. He signed 18 of them.

Tellingly, four of the six Sierra Club-backed bills that the governor rejected were on the list of "job killers" targeted by the Chamber of Commerce. So Schwarzenegger managed to compile perhaps his best record ever with the environmental movement while also satisfying almost every major demand of his business supporters, which is no easy feat.

Three of the four environmental bills he vetoed at the request of the Chamber of Commerce would have expanded the state's role in developing "green building" standards for government and commercial construction.

The other measure was the one that would have placed into state law a standard requiring the sellers of fuel in California to reduce its carbon content by 10 percent. Schwarzenegger already has encouraged the Air Resources Board to adopt such a rule, but he said the version in the bill he vetoed could have limited the effectiveness of that order because it did not include a trading program that would allow refineries to use the most cost-effective method of reducing carbon emissions.

"That uncertainty," Schwarzenegger wrote in his veto message, "could curtail the interest of entrepreneurs in bringing low-carbon fuels to market, reduce the availability of capital required to produce and distribute low-carbon fuels in a consumer-convenient fashion and raise low-carbon fuel prices."

When Schwarzenegger first ran for office in 2003, he was described as a pro-business conservative who supported gay rights and some gun control, and would aggressively promote both environmental protection and economic growth. That is still the case.

And while he has moved to the left in his four years in office, Schwarzenegger's actions on the latest batch of bills sent to his desk suggest that he is still far more protective of business interests than are the Democrats who control the Legislature. Any suggestion that he is "Gray Davis with biceps" is belied by the nearly clean-sweep of vetoes requested by the business and anti-tax lobbies.

That may not be a standard that provides much solace to his former supporters among movement conservatives. But Schwarzenegger's performance, for the most part, puts him in line with the views of mainstream Californians who consider themselves Republicans while perhaps giving independent voters and even some Democrats a new picture of what a Republican office-holder can be.