Assembly Vote Set on Wilson’s Budget Package : Spending: Governor says enough recalcitrant Republicans will break ranks and join Democrats to pass his program. GOP Leader Johnson disagrees.

SACRAMENTO — An increasingly impatient Gov. Pete Wilson told Republican and Democratic legislative leaders Wednesday that he wants a showdown vote in the Assembly today on his deadlocked $56.4-billion budget-balancing program, and the lawmakers agreed.

Wilson emerged from his first meeting in 10 days with the legislative leaders of both houses and said he is confident that enough recalcitrant Republicans in the Assembly would break ranks and join with Democrats to pass his spending program and the taxes and budget cuts he needs to erase the state’s worsening $14.3-billion deficit.

More than a dozen bills must be enacted to balance the budget. “I don’t know that they can all pass (today), but I think we will have sufficient votes to pass pieces of budget,” Wilson said after the closed-door session.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) said he believed he could supply 40 Democratic votes out of the 54 votes needed to approve the Republican governor’s program. That means Assembly Republicans would be called on to provide the other 14 votes.

In addition to the budget, the Assembly will be asked to approve a $4-billion sales tax increase that lower house Republicans have fiercely opposed. Asked if this meant that the Assembly Republicans were willing to vote for the tax increase, Wilson said, “Some of them, I think, will.”

But Assembly GOP Leader Ross Johnson of La Habra, who has spearheaded opposition to Wilson’s budget and proposed taxes, said he will vote against the whole program and predicted that a majority of his 31 members would follow.

Still, Johnson said, “The governor of the state and the titular head of (our) party is entitled to his day in court.” If 14 Republicans do defect to the governor, the program is likely to pass.

Wilson earlier worked out a compromise with Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno. The budget bill and key tax measures were approved by the Senate last weekend, but stalled in the Assembly in the face of GOP opponents who wanted no part of tax increases and demanded deeper cuts in health and welfare spending.

Since then, Wilson has lobbied GOP members and has claimed to peel away enough of them to get the program enacted. “I don’t know that the governor is breaking arms, but he’s certainly had a lot of chats with members of our caucus,” Johnson told reporters.

Brown said he did not intend to send to Wilson a welfare benefits program that would permanently repeal automatic annual cost-of-living increases. The Speaker said that instead he will seek passage of a Democratic-committee-approved alternative that limits the freeze on cost-of-living increases to five years.

“It would be awfully hard to veto that on the basis that it is not in the image of Pete Wilson--and I told him that, “ Brown said.