SACRAMENTO -- The budget impasse in Sacramento is unwelcome news for the soon-to-be-termed-out legislators who hope to persuade voters next year to let them keep their jobs a little longer.

It also is a problem for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wants to enact major health care reform this year. His situation is particularly delicate, since the budget is languishing because he cannot persuade the members of his own party to vote for it.

Perhaps more than anything except a badly handled disaster, late budgets have the potential to drag down approval ratings. They make leaders look ineffective at the main task they were entrusted to perform.

"People reward good behavior and they punish bad behavior," Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, an Oakland Democrat, said Saturday, after an all-night Senate session on the budget accomplished nothing. "We're not getting the job done right now."

During past budget stalemates, the Legislature's approval ratings sank to dismal levels, along with those of the governor.

Pete Wilson bottomed out at 33 percent in 1992, during the early '90s recession. That was about the same as the Legislature's rating, as recorded by the nonpartisan Field Poll. Davis fell to 23 percent in the same poll in 2003, after the ballooning deficits that followed the dot-com bust. Only 19 percent approved of the state Legislature.

Economic times are better now, but Sacramento is nevertheless in the grip of an ugly budget deadlock. Three weeks into the fiscal year, legislators have no spending plan. The state cannot pay its vendors and some state employees are not being paid.

The Democrats' eagerness to avoid more bad p.r. by striking a deal was apparent in their willingness to adopt a budget that spends $1 billion less than Schwarzenegger has proposed. It also takes $1.3 billion away from public transit, something Democrats said earlier this year they would not do.

Assembly Republicans claimed victory, and the plan passed that house. But it died in the Senate, where Republicans, mired in an intraparty power struggle, rejected it.

The impasse threatens to derail the health care reform that Schwarzenegger has been promising all year.

The governor and lawmakers cannot focus on it until they agree on a spending plan, and with the end of the legislative session set for mid-September, time is running out.

Lawmakers have longer before voters are likely to decide on the term limits question. A ballot initiative is heading for the February presidential primary.

It asks voters to relax term limits so lawmakers can serve longer in one house. It would extend the term of the Assembly speaker, Democrat Fabian Nunez of Los Angeles, who otherwise would have to leave office next year. The same goes for Perata.

Term limits are popular, and the initiative has an uphill climb.

The Legislature's approval rating went up this spring to 42 percent, the highest it has been in six years. The disapproval rating was almost the same at 40 percent. The governor's approval rating was 60 percent.

But such highs can be ephemeral, and once they begin to fall, it is hard to raise them. The state's uncertain financial picture means even worse budgets may be ahead.

California faces a $5 billion deficit next fiscal year, and the governor will have to unveil a budget in January, just weeks before the Feb. 5 primary.