The California State Legislature: Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.

If you actually had a government class in school and ever got anything approaching a passing grade, you know that State (and Federal also) government is divided into three branches. You know these are Judicial, Legislative and Executive. You know that every state in the union and the United States Government have bicameral (Meaning two houses) legislatures, except Nebraska who only have a Senate, as you also should know, Legislatures job is to propose and vote on laws.

Democrats spend a lot of time talking about “Transparency”. This talk implies by it’s nature that other people (Republicans) are not transparent, because Democrats talk so much about bringing “Transparency. Some recent events surrounding teh California State Legislature would seem to indicate that perhaps the Democrats who totally control both houses of the Legislature and all the statewide offices are less than sincere about the concept of transparency.

Last year the State legislature passed a new electricity rate bill. It is apparently not enough for PG& E and Edison, California’s two largest electricity providers, to have rates of $0.33 a killowatt hour when every other provider out of California is providing electricity at $0.11-17. Thats right Californians are paying three times to almost double the rates in any other state. The Legislature passed a bill that would raise the rate 22% this summer and another 18% over the following three years. But THATS NOT ALL, there is a new standby charge based on a total household income, of between $360 and $1200 a year, paid on a monthly basis. Was this legislation widely debated? Nooo, don’t be silly. Did the State Assemblypersons and Senators have meetings in their districts to discuss this legislation and gather constituent opinion? I’m rolling on the floor with laughter as I type that. It turns out, newsreporters have been asking detailed questions about how this billing will occur and various other details. The legislature is responding uniformly that they DID NOT READ THE BILL, that it came form the Governors desk, and that there was some kind of deadline and they just voted for it without reading it, at the governors urging. Yes , I know What the……..?

Well, that was bad you say but it was probably a one off, an isolated incident. Wrong. My Assemblyman, the Assembly majority leader,

Chris Holden is the official author of the $20 an hour fast food worker minimum wage bill. The bill has some strange provisions that give fast food franchises that bake bread and sell it separately by a certain date an exemption to the $4 increase this bill provides. When Assemblyman Holden was asked to explain his reasoning for this, he claimed to not only have not written the bread baking amendment, Holden, who is the Assembly majority leader, claimed to have not written the bill and that the unions and other interests along with the Governor’s office wrote it and had him put his name on it. There are claims that the bills bread baking provisions benefit a Newsom donor who also owns numerous Panera Bread franchise operations.

So here we have two bills with far reaching economic impacts with legislator’s names on them that legislators claim, including the Assembly majority leader, they had nothing to do with except allowing their names to be misused as authors and voting as the Governor told them to. No public debate. No consent of the governed. absolutely no idea what they are voting on. The legislation is emanating from the Governors office.

What makes this worse is that we pretty much know Governor Newsom didn’t write this legislation. We know Governor Newsom is severely dyslexic. He can hardly read. let alone write complex legislation. The governors office has been unable to state when any negotiations over these bills may have taken place, who was invited and who attended. They are unwilling and perhaps unable to state what those discussions were. This is probably because the Governor’s office had nothing to do with this legislation except to act as a conduit to the legislature.

Assembly majority leader Holden told us the dark truth. California’s legislation is not being written by anyone the People have elected. It’s all being written by the special interests, the unions, the oligarchs family foundations and passed to the legislature via the governor’s office and the legislature is engaged in a massive charade of pretending to write, debate and vote on legislation. This is what term limits have wrought in California- Rule by the plutocracy and a pretend California government that is inept and disinterested in governance, a government full of poseurs only interested in the pretense of power, status and a paycheck for not actually doing their jobs. They are killing time collecting a paycheck and looking for their next office to parachute into where they can be paid for not doing the People’s business.

I’d like to thank Chris Holden for the “transparency.” No present California member of the State Senate or Assembly should be returned to office. They have all cheated us. We should be suing them for a refund and for damages.