Secrecy abounds on state budget, major bills

Fair warning: By reading this you will be plunging into the Legislature’s almost impenetrably arcane thicket of internal procedures.
To begin at the beginning, for decades the state budget was written in secret by the chairmen of the Legislature’s two fiscal committees, Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance.
This clandestine process exploded in the 1970s during a larger battle over control of the state Senate and for more than a decade the state budget was fashioned more or less