Pawlenty could take the budget in his own hands. Should he?

When recorders are running, House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher always seems to choose her words with care.

So I figured she was trying to convey a point she considered important when, for about the third time in six days, she said something like this when reporters asked about patching the $935 million hole in the state budget:

"It's important for the Legislature, elected by the people, to be participating in that solution, instead of what I would say is a worst-case scenario, having the executive only make the decisions."

She didn't say "unallotment," the Capitolspeak term for the governor's statutory authority to reduce state spending by fiat when the budget is declared out of balance. But that's what she was cautioning against.

It's what could happen along about June 30, if Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature stay true to form and fail to agree on how to close the gap between the spending levels set last year and the reduced tax revenues the state is collecting this year.

June 30 is the de facto deadline for action, because the bulk of the state's spending happens in the first half of its fiscal year, between July and December. Let the summer and fall checks go out with the budget still out of kilter, and setting it to rights by the constitutionally required date -- June 30, 2009 -- could get awfully painful.

Kelliher's words sent me to the Legislature's nonpartisan research offices to bone up on unallotment -- where I wasn't surprised to find that foresighted analysts already had the relevant statute at their fingertips. (For you wonks, that's Statute 16A.152 subd.4.)

Here's a big one: The executive branch need not wait for the Legislature to act. Now that a deficit has been officially forecast, Pawlenty can direct his finance commissioner to begin the unallotment process at any time.

A governor in Pawlenty's situation, confronting a Legislature firmly in the hands of the opposite party, might be tempted to assert his prerogatives and dam up state spending right now.

He wouldn't have to worry about spoiling his relationship with legislators. That's already shot. As he sardonically noted in response to a reporter's question Thursday, the Senate's ouster of Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau from the MnDOT commissioners' suite did not represent a "further fracture" of his relationship with legislators. "As compared to when?" he asked.

But the statute also has a feature that ought to make Pawlenty think twice about unilateral action. The rules say unallotment has to begin with the draining of the reserve fund, which now sits at $653 million.

Take that fund to $0, and Minnesota will sit financially naked and exposed in fiscal 2009. The least little economic hiccup a year from now could compel either draconian cuts or a major tax increase on very short notice. Neither of those moves would enhance the record of a governor who cares about his reputation.

Those, I'd surmise, are the tactics Kelliher has been referring to with her other oft-repeated line: The Legislature should be involved because it can use "all the tools in the toolbox" to balance the budget. Pawlenty can't.

What the law doesn't say -- but history teaches -- is that a governor who takes the burden of balancing the state budget onto his own shoulders is asking for political trouble.

That's what former Gov. Al Quie found in the fall of 1980. That year's election campaign was in full swing. He wasn't on the ballot, but legislators were. Expecting them to interrupt their campaigns to enact unpopular spending cuts didn't strike Quie as realistic, or fruitful. So he cut $195 million, or about 2 percent of the biennial budget, all by himself.

"If I had it to do over again, I'd have called a special session," Quie said last week. By acting alone, he gave every candidate, including his fellow Republicans, license to criticize him. He didn't recover from the political damage he sustained. It put him in a weaker position to govern the state through two more years of economic trouble.

That risk ought to be the biggest deterrent to Pawlenty if he grows tempted to tell legislators that he can manage the budget without them. He can't count on a John McCain ticket out of St. Paul. He's got more than two years left in this term -- and nobody knows how deep the state's deficit is going to go.