California Voices

Jared Martin: In this legislative session, our state’s leaders have spoken with great passion about solving the housing crisis. They say this is the most critical issue facing California. They question how our state’s future will look if we don’t act now. Yet lawmakers haven’t been willing to take the tough votes to move forward meaningful policy that advances the solution: supply.

Glenn Sacks: During the Cold War, Americans were rightly dismayed by 1970s Soviet history textbook’s portrayal of D-Day and America’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Current Russian textbooks and statements by some Russian leaders are similarly problematic. But they’re not the only ones distorting the truth. I know because I am a high school history teacher in the largest public school district in California.

Christian Giller: Inexplicably, the state budget process has left out support for air ambulance. The emergency services provided by air ambulances could disappear if a funding stream that expires at the end of this year is not replaced in the pending state budget.

It was late one night 40 years ago and Gov. Jerry Brown’s most important piece of legislation was in trouble. Brown wanted the Legislature to approve a 42-mile-long “peripheral canal” to carry water around the environmentally fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, thus closing the last major gap in the massive state water system that had been […]

We Californians grabbed nothing less than the edge of a continent, 1,000 miles in length. Highest mountain, lowest desert, longest coast, most epic valley, riparian forest, redwood forest, wetland, grassland and inland sea. The rain fell 125 inches a year in one place and seven inches a year in the other place. A land this crazy makes people crazy.

A collection of commentaries by Dan Walters over the past week.

With an expected Senate special election victory in June, the ranks of female political role models will inch higher at the Capitol and an even broader array of issues may gain attention. Still, when combined with the 2018 electoral successes, women will comprise fewer than one-third of the 120-member Legislature.

Democrats should cast a particularly critical eye on Sen. Bernie Sanders. Support for Sanders’ policies will decline under more intense scrutiny, especially his signature Medicare for All plan.

The battle over California's "gig economy" is underway in the Legislature and a new front has been opened in the California Public Employees Retirement System.

New Assembly rules provide the chairs of committees with the discretion to arbitrarily decide whether to set a bill for hearing or not, without any justification. While most committee chairs are even-handed and set all the bills that have been referred to them, this is not always the case. The saying, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," applies.