Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 6, 1991                   TAG: 9104090647
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BUDGET BILL/ WILDER AND SENATORS IN A SANDBOX

Never mind, for now, the recession, the revenue shortfall and the subsequent reductions in financial aid to many deserving programs.

The budget has become the hockey puck in an unseemly game of one-upmanship between Gov. Douglas Wilder and the Senate of Virginia.

Senators, angry for months over what they view as Wilder's budgetary high-handedness, zapped him Wednesday by killing his proposed budget amendments, designed to restore $15 million in cuts to public education.

Undeniably, there was a political cast to Wilder's proposals: He was trying to recover lost ground as a friend of education (though the $15 million is small change compared to the amounts he cut from school aid). He was also trying to flaunt his authority in dealing with the budget, a plank in his all-but-official platform for the presidency.

By overwhelmingly rejecting most of the governor's amendments - many of which would have eliminated lawmakers' pet projects - the Senate pointedly reminded him of the legislature's own budget authority. The senators sent the budget bill back to Wilder with the extra $15 million for schools restored, but put it to the governor to take it from his prized $200 million rainy-day fund or shut up about it.

Wilder, however, had insisted that the legislature pass all of his amendments as a package. Because the senators declined, he argues that the $15 million is not in the budget. And now the governor has invited public criticism of senators who voted against his amendments; he says they (mostly members of his own Democratic party) have shortchanged public schools in favor of their own pork-barrel projects.

All of which leaves not only the $15 million but the entire budget in constitutional limbo. If Wilder is determined to have his own way, he may use his veto powers over the budget bill. If determined enough that Wilder not have his way, the Senate might bring a legal challenge to any action on the budget which the governor now takes. Or, the governor might take the Senate to court over the question of whether it was legally bound to consider all of his budget amendments as a package.

Swell. As if their relations weren't rocky enough, next we could have the governor and lawmakers suing each other.

The amendments are relatively minor in themselves; politics and prerogatives are what's at stake. Legally right or wrong, Wilder might have avoided this mess by being less imperious toward lawmakers. When he served in the Senate, he would have been among the first objecting to roughshod treatment from the governor's office.

Both Wilder and the senators should remind themselves that the budget isn't a plaything for contending egos, to be fought over in the political sandbox. It belongs neither to Wilder nor the legislators, but to the residents of Virginia - who now are getting sand kicked in their faces.

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