Playing Political Budget Hardball

Speaker of the Kentucky House Greg Stumbo shows how it's done.

House leaders are poised to unveil a state budget proposal in coming days that cuts more than 250 political appointees, trims spending on private contractors, tinkers with the state health insurance program and delays some construction projects.

Appointing friends, campaign contributors and various idiot nephews to high-paying no-show government jobs is a traditional perk of Kentucky governors. Everybody condemns it but nobody ever really puts an end to it because in four years it might be your unemployable relatives getting those "jobs."

But the combination of the worst budget crisis in seven decades and a governor who embodies incompetence has pushed the General Assembly to extremes.

The first year of the budget, which begins July 1, does not include any cuts to the main funding formula for schools or cuts to the state Medicaid program, Stumbo said.

However, it does call for reducing the number of state workers to 2007 levels across the judicial, executive and legislative branches, Stumbo said.

Specifically, Stumbo said there are about 250 non-merit positions — political appointees — that have been added to the executive branch since 2007.

Stumbo said the reductions could likely be accomplished through attrition, but acknowledged that layoffs are possible. “It doesn’t matter how you get there, you just get there,” he said.

The key will be writing the legislation tightly and specifically enough to prevent the governor from keeping his 250 overpaid "advisors" while firing thousands of front-line workers in schools and hospitals and police stations.

Because if the General Assembly leaves the choice to Beshear, that's exactly what he'll do.