The other day in this space I showcased a number of bad Democrat bills that had recently made their way through legislative committees on the strength of the Democrat supermajority. Today, I thought I would highlight a number of bad bills that not only got through the committee process, but that were actually passed off the Assembly floor. That’s right, a majority of supposedly responsible legislators in the nation’s most populace state actually thought these were good ideas and voted for them:
- AB 1266 (Ammiano) – this bill allows boys to change in the girls’ locker room, use the girls’ bathroom, and play on the girls’ sports teams, if the boy feels like a girl. Seriously. According to the author, “all students in K-12 schools must be permitted to participate in school programs, activities, and facilities in accordance with the student’s gender identity.” Now, “gender identity” means the gender with which the student “identifies,” not necessarily the gender into which the student was born, and “facilities” means bathrooms and gym locker rooms. Forty-six Democrats in your state legislature thought this was just fine.
- AB 1121 (Atkins) – this bill makes much easier the procedures to re-write a birth certificate to reflect a name or sex-change. Courts already have the authority to do this, with appropriate safeguards built in to protect the public in these days of widespread fraud and identity theft. But this bill strips the courts of authority to assure that the requested new birth certificate accurately identifies the person requesting the re-write. (Even historical records like birth certificates are not sacrosanct from liberal tinkering. Reminds me of how totalitarian regimes airbrushed disfavored people out of photographs; I also recall that Orwell had something to say on this subject.)
- AB 1008 (Torres) – this bill prohibits judges from conducting a court session when a clerk is not present. It is a full employment act for court clerks and will blow holes in already significantly stretched court budgets. Judges are perfectly capable of conducting routine business like swearing in witnesses when clerks are out of the room. But this bill forces them to shut down proceedings – at significant cost to a severely underfunded court system, and significant inconvenience to jurors and litigants – whenever the clerk has to leave the room.
- AB 1x (Perez) – this bill implemented an optional benefit available under Obamacare. Not surprisingly, the new benefit is extremely expensive, amounts to a considerable expansion of Medi-Cal, and is supposed to be subsidized in part by the Federal government, but the Feds have not guaranteed to continue the subsidy. So why rush into this program if it is (1) optional, and (2) expensive? Good, and completely unanswered, question. This bill will lead to what the San Francisco Chronicle, not a liberal source, called in a front page headline, health insurance “sticker shock.” Its cost to the state, according to the bill’s fiscal analysis will be “in the hundreds of millions [of dollars] annually and over the next decade costs could range in the low billions of dollars.”
- AB 1401 (Judiciary Comm.) – this bill, contrary to the law in every other state, and the Federal government, going back for centuries, allows non-citizens to serve on criminal and civil juries. For more details as to why this is a bad idea, see my article against the bill in the Los Angeles Times here. This idea is so crazy that even the reliably liberal Times opposes it.
Remember these bills and those mentioned in Part 1 the next time a friend or relative tells you they’re going to the polls to vote for Democrats. As imperfect as the GOP can be – and it can be quite imperfect – none of these bills were brought to you by a Republican legislator.