By Barbara Buono

It’s been a tough week of reckoning for New Jersey. This year, the Democrats in the Legislature

that restored funding to programs providing health, education and welfare to the state’s citizens. In drafting our alternative budget, we used revenue projections provided by the state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services, whose staff economists are highly regarded for their impartiality and professionalism.

We expected some give-and-take with the governor. His priorities and ours are not fully aligned. That’s all right. In a democracy, it’s healthy to debate the proper allocation of resources. We expected the governor to veto some of our spending additions and to initiate a thoughtful negotiation on the rest.

But in Gov. Chris Christie’s version of New Jersey, there is no room for disagreement. He has committed the political equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum and, in the process, has turned his veto pen into an instrument of revenge and rebuke. And worst of all, Christie has visited his retribution on those who can least afford it, while protecting those who profit from the hard work of those same people who will be devastated.

First, he slashed most of our restorations for K-12 education, after-school programs for at-risk grade schoolers, tuition grants for working-class college students and health services for women, including cancer screening. Together, these items account for less than 2 percent of the budget.

These cuts are directly and intentionally meant to hurt innocent people as a way of punishing those of us who dare to disagree with him.

But it is not only those who are the most vulnerable who suffer the burden of Christie’s rule of anger. New Jersey’s middle class is also under attack. No institution of the middle class is more scorned by Christie and his allies than public education and those who teach. As in so many other cases, the governor has confused reform with attack.

Here is a truth that Christie ignores because it does not fit his agenda: Many people move to, and stay in, New Jersey municipalities because of the quality of the public schools. These schools are the model for the rest of the nation. But rather than nurture those schools, rather than look to those who teach as valued mentors and experts, Christie attacks, undercuts and privatizes.

Sadly, instead of embracing the notion that we are all in this together, this governor, who confuses nastiness for strength — who consistently misuses the considerable powers of his office to settle petty squabbles, real and imagined — doesn’t even seem to care that he’s missing his intended target. That clash of values — more than money, more than any piece of legislation, more than any line item — is what is at issue.

All of this was terribly disappointing. But the governor didn’t stop there. He decided to

to punish those he perceives as his political opponents.

For starters, the governor cut the budgets at the nonpartisan OLS to punish them for producing revenue projections he did not like. He cut the budgets for legislative staff, though not his own staff spending, in order to punish and muzzle our legitimate and constitutionally mandated check and balance on his edicts. Christie’s proposed budget, given to the Legislature in March, did not include these cuts.

That kind of assault has never occurred before because previous governors understood it would undermine the Legislature’s ability to function as a separate, co-equal branch of government. To this governor, there are no co-equals.

Christie’s blanket assertions that we “don’t have the money” serve as cover to go after anyone who disagrees with him and any program that helps people who don’t support him. This budget is not an act of fiscal responsibility. It is a tool of political revenge at a level previously unseen.

He’s hurting vulnerable people — many of them kids — who have never met him, never tangled with him and never asked to be part of this controversy.

We — on both sides of the aisle — are better than this budget. Now we must act that way and reject the petty politics of revenge and serve all the people of New Jersey.

Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex) is the state Senate majority leader.