The Globe just reported Friday on California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas’ (D-Hollister) orchestrated a shakeup of the leadership lineup in the California Assembly, following the departure of former Speaker Anthony Rendon.
Rivas named Majority Leader Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters) as the replacement to Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles). Her replacement as the former Speaker Pro Tempore is Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg).
The powerful Assembly Appropriations chair Assemblyman Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) was also removed and replaced by a very curious choice – Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland). Wicks is the lawmaker who pushed so hard for infanticide legalization in California. Not sure how much that will forward appropriations bills….
The all-important Assembly Budget Committee chairman Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) was replaced with Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills).
What does all of this mean to the average California voter? And really, who are these people we’ve elected to do the people’s business?
Speaker Robert Rivas’ is a classic California melting pot story: Rivas was raised in Paicines, California, where his grandfather was a farmworker at Almaden Vineyards. Rivas and his brother grew up in farmworker housing, cared for by their single mother and beloved grandparents, who emigrated from Mexico in the 1960s in search of the California Dream, his Assembly biography says.
It’s the other items of import Rivas chose to include in his biography that tell us what is important to him:
- affordable housing
- workplace health and safety protections
- created the Golden State Teacher Grant Program
- the first-in-the-nation COVID-19 Farmworker Relief Package, which included critical efforts related to access to PPE and testing, temporary housing, and health care
- A long-time champion of the environment
- led the effort to accelerate the construction of renewable energy
- ensure the state explores all options to use public lands and oceans to effectively sequester carbon
No surprises there. Rivas is a progressive Democrat.
Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters) comes the closest to business friendly in the Democrat leadership. However, while she may have been effective in Winters California as town Mayor, she recently sponsored ACA 13 with the backing of Speaker Rivas – a devious attack on California’s Proposition 13 – the Constitutional Amendment passed by voters in 1978 to protect property owners from outrageous property taxes.
As Jon Coupal, President of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association explains:
“…radical progressives in the California Legislature launched the most brazen sneak attack on California’s iconic Proposition 13 in its 45-year history. Assemblyman Christopher Ward, backed by the new Speaker of the Assembly, Robert Rivas, introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment 13 (ACA 13). It would amend the constitution to make it easier to raise taxes, by making it harder to pass citizens’ initiatives that seek to enforce Proposition 13’s two-thirds vote requirement for local special tax increases.
The specific target of ACA 13 is a citizens’ initiative backed both by taxpayer organizations and the business community. The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act (TPA) has already qualified for the November 2024 ballot, and polling shows it to be popular with voters. The TPA closes several loopholes created by the courts that have allowed special interests to work with local governments to raise taxes with a simple majority vote instead of the two-thirds vote required by Proposition 13.”
Nuff said. You get it. Her bio makes her sound reasonable, but ACA 13 tells us who she really is… and it’s surprising as the co-owner of an 80-acre walnut orchard with her brothers.
As we mentioned, Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland, who has never held a real job outside of “championing the rights of women and working families, protecting consumers, and reducing gun violence in our communities,” and her work as “a lifelong community organizer,” is the new chairwoman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
The purpose of the Assembly Appropriations Committee:
The committee reviews all bills with any fiscal impact after passage by a policy committee. The committee hears more bills than any committee in the Legislature. In the 2009-10 and 2011-12 sessions combined, the committee heard about 4,600 bills. For contrast, the Business, Professions and Consumer Protection and Public Safety Committees each referred about 400 bills over the course of these two sessions.
The goal of the committee is sound, responsible, affordable fiscal policy.
How comforting that a lifelong community organizer “championing the rights of women and working families, protecting consumers, and reducing gun violence in our communities” is heading the committee responsible for sound, affordable fiscal policy.
And Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills), who at least is “an attorney, civic leader, and lawmaker fighting to advance justice and defend California’s most vulnerable residents,” according to his bio, is “a creative thinker with a proven record of bringing together diverse communities.” Whew. I was concerned that we didn’t have any creative thinkers in the new Assembly leadership. But “Jesse is consistently ranked as one of the Legislature’s most committed environmentalists.” Thank goodness, because we will need an Assembly Budget Committee chairman fighting to advance justice and bring his commitment to environmentalism to the committee.
How is Buffy Wicks, career community organizer, going to “center on fiscal implications” in the Assembly Appropriations Committee?
Buffy Wicks, most notably known for authoring and defending Assembly Bill 2223, California’s “infanticide” legislation, which removed all penalties from anyone violating any abortion health and safety standards when performing an abortion on a woman through all nine months of pregnancy. Her barbaric bill was eventually amended to narrow very slightly the meaning of “perinatal death,” but AB 2223 will still prohibit prosecution of a mother or someone assisting her for causing the death of her born or unborn child if the child died because of injuries sustained while in the womb. That would include injuries caused by a botched abortion, illegal drugs such as meth or heroin. The bill also hampers law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute infanticide. Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks said the bill is about “reproductive justice, pregnancy criminalization, reproductive freedom, and pregnancy loss.”
She’s a ghoul.
Jesse Gabriel is a lawyer who from 2008 to 2010, served as legal counsel to then-U.S. Senator Evan Bayh. He went on to join a large law firm and in 2017, filed two lawsuits against the Trump Administration on behalf of illegal immigrant “Dreamers,” under the DACA program.
Jesse Gabriel is now in charge of the Assembly Budget Committee.
The California Assembly has become a clown show. The Democrats in charge don’t even try anymore to pretend that they are responsible for a $330 billion budget, and the committees designated to administer state police for 39 million residents and millions of businesses.
When Governor Jerry Brown was elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion and the state’s population was a little over 38 million people. Brown doubled the budget up to $199.3 billion – with no measurable increase in population. Gov. Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has grown it to $330 billion in 5 years – while losing population.
Where is all of that new spending going?
The new leadership choices in the Assembly feel more like Speaker Rivas is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic rather than focusing on any strategic policy planning.
And why should we be surprised? Look at the California Legislature today – it’s run by an assortment of people who couldn’t get hired by the Dollar Store – where they would have to work and be accountable. California’s elected Democrats are blinded by their cult-like Marxist ideology over any sense of public service to the people, or desire to govern. And if they are as enlightened as they claim, how is it they don’t appear to care at all about the 800,000 Californians who fled the state in just 2022? That should have been an indicator that something is afoot in California.
The Globe will be reporting on all of that new spending by the Newsom administration.
