Two days ago, the House leadership issued a press release blasting the Warner adminstration for “eliminating $290 million in dedicated transportation funding and eliminating another $100 million for water quality improvements” from a preliminary version of the 2006-08 state budget.

Richard Brown, Gov. Warner’s director of the Department of Planning and Budget, wrote back, explaining that it was all just a misunderstanding. The base budget that the House leadership reacted to, he explained, “is a preliminary number, and does not represent a funding commitment, proposal, or recommendation from or by anyone. … The base budget is prepared by the staff of the Department of Planning and Budget as a technical exercise in beginning to develop a biennial budget. It has no other significance.”

There would seem to be two possible explanations for this mini-flap:

(1) The House leadership knows exactly what it’s doing, and it’s testing the Warner administration or otherwise drawing a line in the sand, to say, “Don’t go there.”

(2) The House leadership doesn’t know what it’s doing, misunderstood the significance of the “base budget,” and overreacted — foreshadowing more confusion in the budget negotiations to come.

Does anyone else have a theory?