California Voices

When California’s voters approved a 2010 ballot measure to reduce the legislative vote requirement for the state budget from two-thirds to a simple majority, they believed that they were merely ending an annual political logjam that sometimes stretched out for months. Unwittingly, however, they were granting the Legislature’s majority Democrats a license to make mischief. The lower […]

Two aphorisms come to mind in weighing the import of Senate Bill 568: –If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. –Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. SB 568, which would shift California’s primary elections from June to March, beginning in 2020, whipped through both […]

I first heard the term “peripheral canal” more than 40 years ago, during a forum of state water officials in Stockton. It came from the lips of William Gianelli, who had returned to his birthplace to tout a canal to carry Sacramento River water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the head of the state’s […]

From all appearances, the California Legislature’s 2017 session was one of the most liberal – or progressive, as liberals prefer to say – in the state’s history. In fact, legislative leaders such as Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon are saying as much. However, despite the overall left-of-center tone to the session that ended last week, the […]

Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the state Assembly, calls the first half of the Legislature’s biennial session, which ended last week, “the most productive and progressive legislative session in memory.” He’s right, if one measures such things by the outpouring of potentially far-reaching measures, including an extension of the cap-and-trade program for reducing carbon emissions, […]

With the 2017 legislative session completed – for better or worse – California politicians are raising money, hiring campaign staffers and mapping strategies for the 2018 elections that will: Bring California a new governor, fill at least four other statewide offices and perhaps – although not likely – elect a new U.S. senator; Determine whether […]

It’s time for liberal Californians – and that appears to be most of us – to take a chill pill. Their bitter disdain for President Donald Trump – and by extension everyone who voted for him, belongs to his party or even agrees with any of his bombastic pronouncements – is leading them into blind […]

Sometimes, if you are stubborn enough, you can fight city hall, or a state bureaucracy, and emerge as a winner. It took nearly a quarter-century, but Gilbert Hyatt is a winner in his long-running battle with California tax collectors over whether he was a Californian or a Nevadan when he began collecting multi-million-dollar royalties for […]

Senate Bill 769 was just one of dozens of measures that were effectively killed by legislative appropriations committees this month without formal votes or explanations why. All of the sidetracked bills were important to their sponsors and legislative authors, of course, but few had the potential socioeconomic impact of SB 769, which would have extended […]

Nearly seven decades ago, historian Carey McWilliams assessed California’s first century of statehood and labeled it “The Great Exception” for its many attributes. The same phrase could be applied to the California Legislature, which habitually carves out great exceptions for particular interests from laws everyone else must obey. State tax codes are riddled with loopholes […]