Governor Brown has some more papers to sign. Please encourage him to do so!
State and local elections matter, and it's good to live in a state with healthy Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature.
While the 2014 mid-term elections saw Democrats losing their supermajorities, they still possess more than 60% of the seats in both the Senate and the Assembly, and with both a Democratic Governor in Jerry Brown and direct democracy through the initiative process, progressives have managed to move forward on multiple fronts in recent years. In particular, California continues to make incremental progress this year on criminal justice reform.
Last November, the passage of Prop 47 reduced penalties for drug possession and enabled re-sentencing of thousands of the unnecessarily incarcerated.
In August, the passage of SB 227 eliminated use of secret grand juries in police shootings.
Last week, the settlement of Ashker v. Governor of California will move thousands of prisoners out of "status-based" (ie, arbitrary and endless) solitary confinement.
Now this week brings additional good news. March on past the orange meringue below to read about three pieces of legislation that have made it past the legislature, and are headed to the Governor's desk this month.
First, two strong bills, SB 178 and AB 953, that should make a difference on the fronts of unwarranted surveillance and racial profiling by law enforcement.
SB 178 is the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and requires law enforcement and federal agencies to secure a warrant before snooping on individual emails, texts, FB posts, tweets and other electronic communication. Amazing that these protections don't exist already, but actually only a handful of states have updated their privacy statutes to take into account digital communications.
AB 953 is the Racial and Identity Profiling Act, and requires law enforcement to document and publish all encounters with Californians, track the demographics of those encounters, and establish an independent board, to include racial justice activists and scholars, to regularly review this data and analyze demographic biases in stop and frisk behaviors.
The ACLU co-sponsored both bills, and the CA Courage Campaign has been out in front on both pieces of legislation. Both of those fine orgs above could use your support to keep the pressure on.
As you can imagine, the police lobby is trying to persuade Brown to kill these bills, and usual suspects are out in force trying to connect this year's temporary increase in specific crime statistics to the passage of Prop 47, so further work is needed to make the case for realignment. The law enforcement lobby is strong in this state, and they managed to kill Holly Mitchell's critical civil asset forfeiture reform bill in the Assembly this week, so it's worth remembering that, as much progress as we've made, we have a lot of work ahead of us to eliminate policing-for-profit.
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Finally, with a nod to Kate Brown and the state of Oregon's precedent-setting motor voter registration legislation, passed earlier this summer, California has followed suit and passed nearly identical legislation through the state senate yesterday.
That legislation is AB 1461, the California New Motor Voter Act.
Unsurprisingly, the measure was passed on purely partisan lines, as Republicans routinely benefit from low-turnout elections (as they did in 2014), and any move to engage more Americans in the democratic process threatens their political viability. So Republican must commit themselves to voter suppression to shrink the electorate and make it less diverse. Polls of "all adults" consistently show greater support for Democrats and progressive policies than polls of "registered voters" or "likely voters".
Passing motor voter bills in blue and purple states will remain critical tools to enlarge Democratic majorities where they stand, and to turn red districts blue where gerrymandering and voter suppression initiatives have distorted the map in the past decade.
If you live in California, please write to our Governor, and encourage him to sign all three bills and help move everyday citizens out of prison, into safe communities, and into polling booths for 2016 and beyond.