California Politics: Mr. Schwarzenegger Goes to Sacramento

Newly-inaugurated Gov. Schwarzenegger is taking immediate action on his campaign promises. Whether that's the good news or the bad news is a matter open for discussion.

He signed an executive order rescinding the car tax increase, one of his main campaign issues. And thereby added $4 billion to the state budget deficit. But he didn't propose other revenue increases or specific budget cuts to pay for that $4 billion tax reduction. New day, or more of the same?

But he says he wants "severe" immediate reductions of $2 billion, which he'll have to specify pretty soon.

As expected, he's called a special session of the legislature to deal with these and other issues, including workers' compensation reform and repealing the law allowing undocumented immigrants to get drivers licenses.

He has also signed an executive order putting a six-month freeze on enforcement of new environmental and consumer-protection regulations. Despite appointing an environmentalist to head the state enforcement agency, he had also floated the idea of dispensing with enforcing state environmental laws. The idea being that the state function is redundant to enforcement by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is currently pretty much an industry captive. So the de-regulation mantra in this area pretty much means letting polluters run free. Kind of like in Texas.

He's also moving, Dick Cheney-style, to put more of the rule-making for such regulations behind a cloak of secrecy. At the same time, he claims to want to remove secrecy regulations from other government records. This looks at first glance like something straight out of the Bush "compassionate conservative" playbook: say things that sound good, then reverse it in the rule-making and funding processes.