Bass beats out Portantino for speakership
The Sacramento Bee is reporting that Karen Bass of Los Angeles has put together enough votes to win the Assembly speakership, beating out a crowded field that included top candidates Anthony Portantino of Pasadena and Kevin De Leon of L.A.
The deal was apparently reached last night, with exiting speaker Fabian Nunez helping Bass, his top lieutenant, secure the votes. Assembly Democrats will caucus in closed session this morning before officially voting for Bass as speaker in once the regular session starts at 9:30 a.m. She will be the first African American woman to lead the chamber.
Portantino gave it a good run, raising lots of money and generating a fair amount of buzz, with the Sac Bee's Dan Walters saying as late as last week that he was the top candidate for the spot. But he apparently could not beat the strong, L.A.-centric coalition put together by Bass and Nunez, or come up with a Willie Brown-style, bi-partisan coup despite his deftness at coordinating with Republicans (he was the only Democratic member of La Canada Flintridge's City Council and did just fine there).
What San Gabriel Valley residents have to consider is whether this will actually hurt the area's already poor prospects at securing state funds. According to Brown's book, "Basic Brown," the Assembly has always been a harsh place, with the losers always suffering for their perceived impertinence by the winners. Brown was crammed into the smallest office in the Assembly after voting against then-anointed Speaker Jesse Unruh and was marginalized after losing a speaker fight to Leo McCarthy before he himself meted out justice to Charles Calderon and the Gang of Five, stripping them of their committee chairmanships when they tried to force him out of the speaker's seat.
Just as Portantino might have steered more money to the Valley as speaker, will he have a harder time providing for his constituents for having challenged Bass? It doesn't seem that this was a particularly nasty fight, with most Dems falling in line behind Bass and Portantino praising the L.A. assemblywoman in an L.A. Times article, saying she will do a "great job."
Hopefully things have changed from the rough and tumble Capitol days of the 70s and 80s and any backlash is minimal.
Comments
Posted by: Dog Spot | March 2, 2008 6:55 PM