Former California Republican Party chairman and incoming Republican National Committeeman Shawn Steel posted a blog entry last night on the FlashReport saying it’s fine with him that California is more than 50 days past its constitutional deadline for a state budget.

Democrats are actually counting the days since the budget was supposed to be approved. Who cares?

Not real people. Not the producers. Not the private sector workers. Not families who want to be left alone. Not those who find government a busy-body-nanny-state-regulators.

Only those on the take. Those who take state pay checks. And, they should be comfortable waiting. After all one of the key reasons for the massive hemorrhage of red ink, are government unions greed in fleecing taxpayers at any cost.

Any budget delay is good news for taxpayers.

Grammatical errors notwithstanding, this is a great glimpse into the soul of the Republicans who’re steadfastly standing in the way of a state budget. They believe government — all government — is bad, and they’ll do anything to starve it.

It’s no surprise Steel feels this way; he was a founder of California’s arm of the Club for Growth, the arch-conservative political organization and PAC which stands for slashing government through means such as making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich; privatizing Social Security and otherwise slashing the public social safety net for seniors and others; and gutting funding for public schools.

But it’s patently offensive — and many might argue, inane — to characterize “those who take state paychecks” as being “on the take.” Claiming that all public employees are corrupt money-grubbers is a lowest-common-denominator argument, appalling from someone who plays so high-profile a role in our political process.

And is the budget delay good for low-income families who’re struggling to get child-care so they can hold onto their jobs? For seniors and disabled people who rely on state health services to remain in their homes, or to survive? For our children’s schools? Methinks this well-to-do trial attorney — who lives in a tiny, rich, gated community — isn’t very much in touch with the day-to-day lives of most Californians.

This isn’t “run government like a business;” it’s “run government into the ground.” This isn’t conservatism; it’s anarchism.

Not even the U.S. Constitution is safe from Steel’s allegedly conservative rant.

Add the very liberal, former social worker and Jimmy Carter appointee, Federal Judge Thelton Henderson , who now threatens to exacerbate the California catastrophe by demanding some 8 billion dollars so that convicts can have better care than many lawful Californians.

Henderson placed the state prisons’ healthcare system in federal receivership not only because the state lost a lawsuit claiming inmates were receiving constitutionally inadequate care — that’s “cruel and unusual punishment” — but because the state for years after losing that lawsuit failed to make any significant effort to fix the problem. In other words, if Sacramento hadn’t been cutting corners for so long as to the true costs of incarceration (our prison system now has about 170,000 inmates, a population larger than that in any of 27 California counties), we wouldn’t be in this bind right now.

Steel and those of his ilk want to see government fail so they can continue to argue for its dismantling, hence Steel’s suggestion to “let the budget process drift along.” But it’s ordinary Californians who’re set adrift by this patently partisan political ploy.