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A week after the November election, I joined nearly two dozen newly elected members of the state Assembly gathered in Sacramento for a closed-door training program. The group included both Democrats and Republicans — because the training was not on policy issues or politics — but on how the state Legislature itself works.
What new legislators are taught should outrage California voters whether they are Democrat, Republican or in between.
Worse, it explains why our state Legislature repeatedly fails to deliver on the public’s demand for change on a wide range of issues including our cost-of-living crisis, crime wave, homelessness problems, job losses and failing schools.
First, by the time politicians take office, they already know the golden rule: Those who give the most campaign money make the rules.
Most state legislators owe their seats to campaign contributions from corporate special interests, lobbyists and labor union bosses. Very few state legislators raise significant support from small dollar grassroots donors — making them particularly dependent on keeping special interests happy even if it means not giving the public what it wants.
Second, legislators are taught how the lobbyists and special interests can continue to curry favor with them legally without having to report gifts from them. “You can eat their food and drink their alcohol as long as it isn’t too much or if it’s a campaign reception,” incoming lawmakers are told. Perhaps these lawmakers can buy their own meals like real people?
Subjected to constant pressure from special interests to cancel out the voice of the people, new legislators are also taught a variety of tricks to avoid accountability.
The first trick the state Legislature uses involves imposing bad policies on you without the state legislators having to take the blame.
That’s why the state Legislature delegated sweeping authority to unelected bureaucrats to impose taxes, fees and mandates.
This trick has most recently been used to impose a new tax on oil and gas and impose flat rate surcharges to your utility bills. It has even been used to impose sweeping restrictions on the way we live — such as with the ban on the sale of all new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. It is now being used to impose costly and inconvenient bans on natural gas appliances in your home.
The second trick involves killing popular reform bills without the public knowing their own state legislator was involved.
CalMatters recently released an analysis showing how 75% of the more than 2,400 bill proposals that died in the Legislature this past year were killed without a single vote of the legislators.
One legislator bragged that he has never had to vote “No” on any bills. Given how many bad ideas are proposed by politicians, that should be a dead giveaway that something is wrong with the process.
State legislators can kill bills by not referring them to a committee for consideration — or even if they are referred, the chairs of the various legislative committees can simply decide not to hold a hearing or a vote on the bill.
In the rare cases where a popular bill opposed by the special interests gets a recorded vote, the rules allow state legislators to simply walk out of the room without voting.
The most cynical way state legislators kill popular bills while pretending to support them is to vote for the bill in a committee and then quietly ask the Assembly Appropriations Committee to refer the bill to a “Suspense File” where it dies — again, without a single recorded vote actually opposing the bill.
The end result is zero accountability — where state legislators kill popular ideas not desired by powerful special interests all the while telling the folks back home they really support the bill.
Finally, state legislators are trained in all the laws politicians have exempted themselves from. That’s right — state lawmakers impose rules on ordinary people and businesses, but don’t have to follow a range of laws on a variety of things from public record disclosures to basic employment protections.
While I won’t make many friends in the state Legislature by revealing these tricks, I believe we must reform this corrupt culture and unaccountable system.
That’s why I’ve introduced a package of bold reforms called the Contract to Reform California. My proposals would force legislators to vote on bills before they are killed, impose a total gift ban and lifetime lobbying ban on politicians, prohibit trading stock, and require state politicians to live under the same rules as the rest of us — no special exemptions.
To learn more and to join the fight, visit www.ReformCalifornia.org.
