SACRAMENTO — Over impassioned objections from GOP lawmakers, California Democrats on Thursday used a budget maneuver to help out a freshman colleague, Sen. Josh Newman, who faces an ugly recall battle in Southern California after voting for increasing the state’s gas tax less than six months after he was elected.

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Skelton: How needed police reform bill was quietly killed Slipped into a budget-related bill on a veteran’s cemetery was a provision to add new requirements for qualifying a recall petition for the ballot. Such changes would almost certainly delay a Newman recall to a general election.

General elections typically have better turnouts than special elections and favor Democrats.

Republicans are furious about the move, which bypasses the lengthy process through which policy bills are typically vetted. That it appeared in a bill establishing a new location of a new Southern California veteran’s cemetery made it more offensive to opponents.

“It’s just flat out wrong,” said Assemblyman Devon Mathis, a Republican from Visalia, in an interview. “I’m a combat veteran, and I didn’t get blown up twice in Iraq to come home and see this happen.”

The vote on the recall election provisions was the most contentious issue in the budget debate. The budget deal provides $3.2 billion more to schools, extends a tax credit to more than a million low-wage workers and their families, and boosts payments to doctors and dentists who treat Medi-Cal patients.

It also gives the Legislature unprecedented control over spending at the University of California’s central administration, as recommended in a highly critical state audit.

Other budget-related bills passed Thursday included regulations for the state’s newly legalized recreational marijuana industry and legislation to strip the troubled Board of Equalization of most of its power and create a new state agency in its place.

The main budget bill sailed through both houses, but there were strong partisan divisions over the bill to change the recall election rules.

Assemblyman Dante Acosta, a Republican from Santa Clarita — a Gold Star parent whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2011 — gave a moving speech about his family’s search for a cemetery close to home before urging his colleagues to vote no on what he called a “baldly political move.”

“It’s heartbreaking to see such a vaunted institution as the California state Legislature, in some ways … use a veteran’s cemetery … as the reason to vote for this bill,” Acosta said, before the Assembly approved the bill, 49-26, with a handful of Democrats not supporting it.

But Democrats argue that the effort to recall Newman, D-Fullerton, has been accused of using misleading tactics to gather signatures, such as claiming the recall is necessary to “Stop the Car Tax,” and that reforms are needed. The gas tax, however, was passed by the Legislature in May and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. So Newman’s recall would not reverse it.

On Wednesday, Newman’s supporters filed complaints with the Secretary of State’s Office, the California Attorney General’s Office and local district attorneys, demanding an investigation into what they called “illegal misrepresentations by the committee circulating petitions.”

The bill creates a 30-day period for citizens to withdraw their signatures from a recall initiative. It also calls for a Department of Finance analysis of the cost of a special election — and 30 days for a legislative committee to comment on that analysis.

Senate leader Kevin de León on Thursday told his colleagues — who ultimately supported the bill, 26-11, mostly on a party-line vote — the reforms were crucial and that he was “shocked” that anyone would oppose it.

“Never before in the history of the recall process have we seen deception so brash, so brazen, so obviously coordinated and so specifically dishonest,” he said. “If you don’t support these simple, straightforward reforms, you are not just condoning what is going on. … You are complicit in the one of the most troubling election frauds of our time.”

But one California elections expert said she found the legislation “dispiriting,” saying that it was written for Democrats’ political gain rather than to address the problem of misleading signature-gathering tactics. Newman’s narrow victory in November secured his party a supermajority in the Legislature.

“If this was truly about trying to get at the systemic problem of false signature gathering, I don’t think the bill would look this way,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor. “It would be broader — it would apply to all the different ways we gather signatures.

“This,” she added, “seems to be targeted at lengthening the time to get a recall on the ballot, which in this case would help Sen. Newman.”

Republicans on Thursday made several failed attempts to amend the bill on the Assembly floor as they spoke passionately against it.

“This is embarrassing,” said Assemblyman Marc Steinorth, R-Rancho Cucamonga. “The people of California deserve better.”