It has been a banner week for corruption and exploiting political power in California. Now, the state’s attorney general is in the hot seat.
California voters sometimes use statewide ballot propositions to mitigate the state’s left-wing lurch and to rein in terrible Democratic Party ideas. In recent years, Californians have voted down affirmative action, exempted rideshare apps from the state’s destructive anti-freelancing law, and renewed a push for harsher criminal penalties.
This arrangement is pretty inconvenient to Democrats sometimes, which is why they do what they can to sabotage some of these propositions. Attorney General Rob Bonta gets to decide how these propositions are named and summarized, allowing him to try and manipulate voters through biased language. Take the proposal from a parent activist group to keep boys out of girls’ sports and other girls’ spaces and require schools to notify parents when their children try to change their identities at school.
How did Bonta choose to label this proposal to protect parents’ rights and protect children from rabid transgender ideology? He called it the “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative.”
This isn’t a one-time thing, either. Bonta’s predecessor Xavier Becerra, who is now the Health and Human Services secretary, used this power to tank the gas tax repeal in 2018. California’s gas tax hike was wildly unpopular when polled, but Becerra put the repeal on the ballot under the following, longwinded, convoluted description: “Eliminates Recently Enacted Road Repair and Transportation Funding by Repealing Revenues Dedicated For Those Purposes. Requires Any Measure to Enact Certain Vehicle Fuel Taxes and Vehicle Fees Be Submitted to and Approved By the Electorate.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
If you asked California voters if they wanted to repeal the gas tax, you got 50% support to 46% opposition. But the wording of the proposition polled worse, and the measure ultimately failed with almost 57% opposition to 43% support. A major Democratic priority was saved from the wrath of voters, all through an active effort to confuse voters about what exactly it was for which they were voting.
This is yet another underhanded way that California Democrats hold on to power to get their way. Bonta and Becerra have used their positions to avoid giving inconvenient ballot propositions a fair shake in front of voters because they can’t do their jobs without serving as partisan attack dogs for the Democratic Party.
