SACRAMENTO — Democratic leaders in the Legislature on Wednesday went on the offensive against the 14 Republican senators who are blocking passage of the state budget.

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said he is through negotiating. "What they have asked for is overreaching," he said. "We're not going to do it. It's done. It's over. It's finished."

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, D-Los Angeles, also ruled out further negotiations with what he called "a group of renegades who are totally out of touch with the people of California."

The budget, now 40 days late, was approved by a bipartisan vote of the Assembly on July 20, but is stalled one vote short of passage in the Senate. Fourteen of the 15 GOP senators say they will not provide the decisive vote until they get more concessions.

All Democratic senators and Republican Sen. Abel Maldonado have voted for the budget, but one more vote is needed to provide the necessary two-thirds majority.

A key demand of the Republicans is passage of a bill, unrelated to the budget, that would bar anyone from filing lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act based on the assertion that government agencies failed to take into account impacts on global warming when considering development projects.

Perata said he will not negotiate the issue.

"I will not bargain away California's environment to oil refiners and multi-state developers," he said. "There will be no negotiations on CEQA. End of sentence."

Nuñez seconded that view later in the day — and then upped the stakes. Noting that negotiations in the Senate had trimmed an additional $500 million in spending from the budget approved by the Assembly, he said he will not entertain discussion of any new bonds unless that money is restored.

"Any discussion about bonds ... is off the table," he said.

The effect of that would be to scuttle any possibility of putting a water bond on next year's ballot — a bond sought by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican lawmakers and farming interests around the state.

Senate Republican leader Dick Ackerman of Irvine called the Democrats' stance unproductive.

"That's not really a responsible position," he said of Perata's vow to end negotiations on a key issue. No budget is going to get passed, Ackerman said, "unless people talk."

Perata, flanked by representatives of the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense and the Planning and Conservation League, called protecting the environment "one of the fundamental values of California politics."

Bill Magavern of the Sierra Club said Senate Republicans are seeking to undermine the state's bedrock environmental law — one that was passed in 1969 and signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Senate Republicans seek to prohibit any CEQA lawsuits based on global warming issues until regulations are established to implement the state's landmark global warming law enacted last year. Those regulations will not be completed until 2012.

"All we are saying is that we should wait until those regulations are developed," said Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto.

Environmental activists say the first lawsuits seeking to force local governments to consider global warming impacts had been filed years before passage of last year's law — and thus the issue of the pending regulations is irrelevant.

The Republicans' demand, they said, would allow developers to proceed without having to consider how to minimize their projects' effects on global warming.

GOP senators, said Magavern, are "listening only to the special interests. When the developers and oil refiners say, Jump!' these 14 senators ask, How high?' "

Perata is scheduled to resume putting pressure on Republicans today by holding a news conference next to an oil refinery along the San Francisco Bay.

"It is shameful that this issue is holding up the budget," he said.

Nuñez said he intends to get out the message that the vast majority of the Legislature — 78 of its 120 members — has already approved a budget.

"I'm going to work very hard to see to it that ... voters can distinguish between who voted for a budget and who didn't. ... Not since Newt Gingrich have we seen this type of government."

Gingrich, then speaker of the House of Representatives, forced a brief, partial shutdown of the federal government in 1995 in a budget showdown with President Clinton.