Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has said that he doubts State revenues will come "roaring back" in the coming year, but their has been a surge in sales tax collections of over $100 million. The Governor is still calling for general cuts in spending of 1% to 2%. The Governor will not present a budget until early March-something the General Assembly agreed to before taking its post-inaugural recess. While cuts in spending are indeed likely to save the State from having to indure the idea of an unconstitutional unbalanced budget, the delay in presentation of a budget may also have the impact of prolonging the legislative session, perhaps in ways and for reasons that might otherwise be unnecessary.

While a strong Republican majority in the Tennessee General Assembly is likely to maintain insistence on budgetary and fiscal discipline, a legislative session that goes beyond early May will still be prone to produce a budget that might feature some of the less desirable elements of what we might refer to as political sausage-making. Many Republican candidates ran on platforms of streamlining State government and scrapping unnecessary State bureaucracies and the bureaucrats that go with them. Yet Governor Haslam continues to insist that he doesn't intend to cut any State jobs this year. Those two positions don't seem to add up, so the question should be begged: Will the Republican General Assembly and the Republican Governor have a confrontation late in the legislative session over State layoffs and cuts to executive agencies?