In summary
While Sen. Monique Limón doesn’t have a blockbuster legislative victory to show for her first year as pro tem, her biggest win so far is her popularity with Senate colleagues. Unlike her predecessor, who was known as a micromanager, Limón’s egalitarian, “govern by consensus” approach has kept her caucus in lockstep.
The last deal of the legislative session was supposed to be a win for Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón.
After weeks of negotiations, and at least one sleepless night, Limón’s team backed a plan to address the ballooning costs of wildfires that they said would protect survivors and keep utilities on the hook for fires their equipment caused. The Senate had stood firm against Gov. Gavin Newsom — not folding on all the ways he wanted to spread wildfire costs around while reducing them for utility companies.
Then it all came crumbling down.
During an hourlong caucus meeting on the final morning of the legislative session, far past the eleventh hour, the Assembly decided to walk away from the compromise Limón brokered with Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and the governor. In abandoning the deal, Rivas said it didn’t “deliver the relief, accountability or meaningful reform that Californians deserve.” Utilities and electrical workers had waged a dayslong lobbying effort to undermine the deal.
Soon after the Assembly killed the deal, Limón told reporters the Senate had the votes to approve the measure.
“There certainly is a sense of disappointment,” she said, flanked by seven other members of the caucus, to whom she encouraged reporters to ask additional questions.
Ever since Limón’s colleagues elected the Democratic senator from Santa Barbara as their leader last summer, one thing has been clear: She wants the spotlight on her caucus, not on herself.
Interviews with current and former legislators and staff paint a picture of a leader who eschews the top-down approach. In contrast to her predecessor Sen. Mike McGuire, who many members and staff have privately characterized as a micromanager, Limón took time to reach consensus with her colleagues and gave senators more authority on issues they’re passionate about.
While she did not finish the session with a blockbuster victory to tout, Limón in her first year as pro tem made meaningful, albeit incremental, progress on thorny topics such as new taxes and changes to sexual assault liability, and protected her caucus from several particularly difficult votes on politically fraught issues from the governor.
And while a tough budget year threatened to fracture the caucus and test the limits of a “govern by consensus” strategy, the Senate leader’s biggest wins came largely because she kept her colleagues united even at the expense of alienating the governor.
“Our ability to effectively get items across the finish line is not based simply on, you know, one or two or three or four members,” she said in an interview with CalMatters. “I think it is the caucus itself.”
And for some members of Limón’s caucus, even the failed wildfire deal still amounted to a win.
“We did not come out looking like we couldn’t make a decision,” said Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat. “We were united in a decision that was made, and we stayed true to it.”
Threading the needle on budget woes
At the beginning of the year, Limón stared down the possibility of a legislative session rife with conflict given the state’s gloomy budget outlook and a host of priorities competing for limited funds.
The governor’s budget proposal primarily sought to capitalize on the windfall of AI revenue and pad the state’s rainy day fund. The idea of passing any new taxes to patch holes left by federal cuts and shore up the state’s long-term revenue shortfalls seemed like a long shot given Newsom’s presidential ambitions, especially given the Legislature’s desire to lower Californians’ cost of living on the eve of an election.
Yet Limón and her caucus forged ahead with plans for a new tax known as the “fair share plan,” which would require corporations with a large number of employees on Medi-Cal to pay a payroll tax to help fund those employees’ healthcare.
The caucus united behind the idea during a two-day budget retreat in the early spring, according to Sen. John Laird, Limón’s pick to chair the chamber’s budget committee. The Senate’s budget plan, released in April, included the tax. A month later, Newsom indicated he’d be open to new revenue sources. From there, Laird said, Limón and Senate Democrats pressed the Assembly to get on board with the idea of at least studying the issue.
Ultimately, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 177, a watered-down version that ordered a study on how the state could implement such a tax, and Newsom signed it in July. Still, Limón’s camp considered it a win — Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra embraced the tax proposal and committed to implementing it if elected governor.
“She took a united caucus into the negotiations, and so I think it was a high level of skill that sort of navigated all the differences in the caucus to get to a unified position,” Laird said.
Sen. Eloise Gómez-Reyes, one of five women of color serving as budget subcommittee leaders under Laird, attributes some of the collaborative spirit to the number of women in leadership positions.
“I will tell you that when we got together for the first time, when we looked around the room, we said, ‘Hey, this is wonderful,’” she said, of the budget leaders.
Laird said, too, that as a member of Limón’s leadership team and the rules committee, which manages internal Senate business such as assigning bills to committees, he often found himself in a room full of women. He pointed out that he graduated from college before 1976, when the first woman was elected to the state Senate. The Senate reached gender parity in 2024 and maintains equal representation.
“It’s not a white guy herding everybody around,” Laird said. “There’s diversity in the caucus, and everybody sees it in the leadership and sees it in the inclusion of all the Democratic senators.”
Committed to justice for victims
Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Pasadena Democrat who represents the fire-torn community of Altadena, said she was pleased Limón included her in the Senate’s working group to address wildfire liability.
California’s three major investor-owned utilities, a formidable and wealthy force in state politics, have lobbied Newsom hard to decrease the amount they have to pay after their own equipment causes wildfires. The utilities called for banning a practice known as “subrogation,” in which insurance companies try to recoup what they paid in policyholder claims from responsible parties, such as utilities.
Limón, who previously went to bat for survivors of the 2018 Thomas Fire in her own district, told Pérez she wanted to ensure victims were central to any policy the Senate endorsed.
“I recognize that that was not something that she needed to do,” Pérez said. “So it certainly meant a lot to me and it’s meant a lot to my constituents, too.”
Pérez said Limón took time to meet hundreds of residents from Altadena who traveled to Sacramento to share their frustrations about the governor’s suggested plan to roll back subrogation and cap noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering for victims. At the victims’ behest, the Senate successfully pushed to eliminate those two contentious proposals from the deal.
Similarly, Limón prioritized including sexual assault survivors during discussions between the two houses over how the state could help cash-strapped local governments and school districts that were being sued by people who say they were sexually assaulted as children by employees of those entities.
Menjivar said Limón appointed her to the working group addressing sexual assault liability partially because of her background as a social worker. As a representative for Los Angeles County, which has paid close to $5 billion to survivors, Menjivar’s district is in the thick of the issue. When the Senate first attempted to broker a deal on the rising costs last year, Menjivar was one of five senators, including Limón, who did not back the plan that she felt limited survivors’ rights too much.
While cities, counties and school districts wanted to cap the amount of money that survivors could seek in damages, survivor advocates were adamant that any damage limit equated to putting a price tag on their assaults. Limón and the Senate Democratic caucus largely agreed with survivors and refused to accept any plan that included damage caps. Such limits were not included in the final deal, which also introduced several new strategies and safeguards intended to prevent child sexual assault in the first place.
“To listen to the people that were the most vulnerable and had no special interest funding really just showed incredible, like, strength as a leader,” said Chantel Johnson, an advocate for foster and justice-involved youth with the Youth Law Center. “We certainly could have been left out of it.”
Going against the governor
Over the summer, Limón made the rare move of not bringing up two controversial parole commissioners who Newsom reappointed to their posts after they authorized the release of men who were convicted of sexually abusing children in the 1990s, a decision that flew under the radar of both the press and Republican legislators.
The tactic prevented Democratic senators from having to vote on politically unpalatable appointees and left two parole board veterans without a job. Criminal justice advocates said it further politicized the process. Newsom’s office declined to comment on the decision.
Limón’s office also let local representatives weigh in on other priorities of the governor, including the tech billionaire-backed California Forever proposal for a shipbuilding facility in Solano County and a proposed environmental carve-out for a developer in Santa Monica. Both failed in the final hours of the legislative session last month.
Outgoing Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones, of San Diego, said Limón took a stronger stand against the governor than her predecessors.
Especially through the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones said, “the Legislature just let the governor lead them around by their noses, so to speak,” he said. This year, he said, lawmakers were aware of the governor’s priority projects and then “they never came.”
Incoming Republican leader Sen. Roger Niello of Roseville said the pro tem is popular on both sides of the aisle, and is always “accessible” to hear his party’s perspective.
The one upcoming challenge he sees for Limón is figuring out when it’s time to step aside and usher in a new pro tem, a process that can either be organized or an “overthrow.” All legislators have 12-year term limits, and Limón’s term ends in 2028.
“A leader has to know when it’s time to change,” he said.
