When the founders assembled America 250 years ago, they advanced the organizing principle of policy for the country, namely monarchy-defying republican government. Having come through this year’s 2027 Budget Process in a year when we celebrate our nation’s semiquincentennial, we experience their grand design all over again, at the state level, with deepened kinship and gratitude to those sons of the Enlightenment.

We take inspiration from the vivid and vital process of representative government and the work of citizen legislators working with the Governor to sustain services for the people of New Jersey.

Was the process perfect?

Of course not.

We agree with Senator Declan O’Scanlon (R-13) about the rushed 11th hour conditions of the budget, and we too lament the lack of transparency down the stretch. But we also listen with care to what Senator John Burzichelli (D-3) said just prior to his “yes” vote on the $60.7 Budget document, which is that if anyone doesn’t think the Budget Committee presided over a transparent process through long and exhaustive months of hearings and testimony, they haven’t been paying attention.

It’s true, what Burzichelli says, but it doesn’t diminish the late budget flurry, obfuscation of detail, and intensification of questions, especially about expensive and – if they came to light earlier, certainly controversial - earmarks. A $100 million loan for Jersey City as it grapples with its own local budget crisis and the prospect of a 20% tax increase seems especially onerous for New Jersey taxpayers. In addition, bills that appear to repurpose environmental dollars for recreation take on a meaning at odds with conservation. And these are just two examples.

This year’s budget contains the woeful burdens of past state mistakes combined with punishing cuts enacted by the Trump Administration, which impact in an especially injurious way those New Jersey residents who depend on Medicaid. But we all know the deep troubles in the state as they relate to crushing property taxes, complicated by a housing crisis that makes it nearly impossible for many people to live here. The old problems persist - with a vengeance. Too many people. Not enough affordable housing. The enormous neighboring financial sector creates the market incentive for contractors to build (and build!) luxury housing for commuters – not workers. Substantial portions of the state are protected and environmentally sensitive. Undevelopable. New public demands - a consequence of AI, and population - overburden the energy grid. Any investment by government hovers dangerously at the edge of permanently expanding government. Programs meant to defray costs – unintentionally – simply end up contributing more brutal costs. All against the backdrop nationally of a madman throwing his ugly and decrepit face on the public domain, desecrating our common temples, waging a war with masks and guns against the most vulnerable populations of the country, and dropping bombs on schoolgirls on the other side of the world as part of an unconstitutional $2 Billion dollars a day war.

Our troubles seem intractable. Our system at present is ill-equipped and undermanned to survive the reversal of America’s shift of power from the wealthy to the working class, and what is at the cancerous core of our government - wealth-infused corruption - and wave upon wave of foot soldiers unleashed in the cause of our own appetites, not the demands of citizenry prepared to protect our tough-fibered democratic republic.

But if we have a starting point, for all the ill it dishes out, the State Capitol in this place that helped shaped the foundations of the country continues somehow – even if only feebly at its best - to remind us of the seminal sacredness of civilized discussion and debate. We have to come back from the division to a sense of wholeness, and in the halls of government, here in New Jesey anyway, to the extent that people in both parties come from a place called America, 250 years old, we have an imperfect model, to strive, at this pressing and historic time, for a more perfect union. In the words of the WWI poet Ramon Guthrie, “We cannot win, though we perhaps have won, if we can only believe that this is not the end.”

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