White

Article IV, section 12 of the California Constitution provides in part that “[t]he Legislature shall pass the budget bill by midnight on June 15 of each year,” but in recent years the timely adoption of the budget bill in California has proven to be the exception rather than the rule. This proceeding arises out of two taxpayer actions that were filed in the wake of budget impasses that occurred in 1997 and 1998. In the action filed in 1998, the trial court issued a preliminary injunction broadly barring the Controller from making payments from the state treasury in the absence of passage of the budget bill or an emergency appropriation—a preliminary injunction that largely would have shut down government operations in California, but for the Legislature’s prompt enactment of an emergency appropriation and the Court of Appeal’s subsequent order staying the effect of the preliminary injunction. In the Court of Appeal, the Controller contended that, contrary to the trial court’s ruling in the 1998 case, a variety of payments lawfully may be made from the treasury during a budget impasse. Although the ultimate passage of budget bills in 1997 and 1998 rendered the appeals in…