California Voices

It's amusing that Democrats are outraged about gerrymandering. Republicans are merely doing what Democrats did for many decades, until the GOP turned the tables.

It will be a misdemeanor crime in California to interfere with the state auditor's investigations.

With some fanfare, Gov. Jerry Brown last week signed a package of bills aimed at relieving an acute shortage of housing that has sent costs into the stratosphere and given California the nation’s highest level of functional poverty. “These new laws will help cut red tape and encourage more affordable housing, including shelter for the […]

Just because you’re paranoid, the old saying goes, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. California’s liberal politicians have been paranoid, often ridiculously so, about what’s been happening in Washington of late. Nevertheless, two events last week bolster the notion that California is being targeted by the Trump administration, a Republican Congress and even the conservative-dominated […]

California has spent tens of billions of extra dollars on its K-12 school system in recent years on promises that its abysmal levels of academic achievement – especially those of disadvantaged children – would be improved. And what have those massive expenditures – a 50 percent increase in per-pupil spending – and a massive reworking […]

California legislators had a rare opportunity this year to make a significant improvement in the lives of millions of children at little or no cost – and they muffed it. Senate Bill 328, which would prohibit California’s middle and high schools from beginning classes before 8:30 a.m., passed the Senate but was overwhelmingly rejected by […]

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 […]