President’s Message: They Don’t Know What They’re Voting On

By Jon Coupal

Frequent readers of this column will know that the state budget process is a sham. The “budget bill,” which is supposed to be a comprehensive spending plan for the fiscal year reflecting the policy priorities of the state, has morphed into an ongoing legislative process that has no beginning and no end. Even after the budget is “passed,” many details are to be filled in later via a slew of “trailer bills.”

These trailer bills often start out blank except for a single line of text expressing the intent to do something related to the budget. After the real budget is negotiated, largely in secret by the governor and legislative leaders of the Democratic majority, the agreed-upon provisions become “amendments” to the blank bills that can have very little, if anything, to do with the implementation of the budget.

These trailer bills then rush through the Legislature in days or even hours because in a one-party state like California, there is no one to say no.

That’s how Assembly Bill 205 came to be. AB 205 was a budget trailer bill passed in 2022 that did several things related to energy (how exactly any of them relate to the budget, I don’t know), but most controversially, it required investor-owned utility companies to charge a monthly fixed rate for electricity based on the customer’s household income, along with separate rates for usage.

Every Democrat in the Assembly at the time voted for it and all but four Democrats in the Senate did, too. So imagine our surprise when earlier this year, Democrats in the state Legislature announced the introduction of a bill to repeal that part of Assembly Bill 205.

At the press conference announcing the bill, reporter Ashley Zavala, capitol correspondent for KCRA News here in Sacramento, brought up the fact that many of the legislators at the press conference had themselves voted for AB 205 and wondered what had brought about their change of heart.

“AB 205 should have had a very robust conversation,” said Ventura County Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, who is carrying the bill to repeal the income-based electricity charges provision. She noted that it was “part of a huge trailer bill” and she did not think that was the appropriate place for it.

The assemblywoman is right, a trailer bill is not an appropriate place for this. In fact, trailer bills aren’t an appropriate place for anything. They shouldn’t exist. The actual budget should be the budget. But these lawmakers seem to want us to believe that they simply didn’t know what they were voting on.

The problem with this claim is that the provision was not hidden in the fine print. It was highlighted as the second bullet point of their own legislative analysis. Here is what it said: “[AB 205] requires the fixed charge to be established on an income-graduated basis with no fewer than three income thresholds, such that a low-income ratepayer would realize [a] lower average monthly bill without making any [changes] in usage, as specified.”

So, it is hard to believe that Assembly members Chris Ward, Marc Berman, Alex Lee, Sharon Quirk-Silva, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Phil Ting, Senator Scott Wiener, and the others who were huddled around Irwin did not know. That is especially true of Ting, as he was the Assembly budget chair at the time, and the bill was “authored” by his committee. And yet, they all voted for AB 205.

Why the change of heart now? Well, they got caught, and these mostly coastal Democrats are likely hearing from their high-income constituents about their already-high electricity bills.

It would be laughable if this were not all so serious, because in the lawsuit filed by the state Legislature and the governor against the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, they have the nerve to argue that allowing the people of California to vote on any statewide tax increase “would have sobering implications for the future of governance.”

The governor and the Legislature claim that “taxation is both highly complex and essential to the adequate functioning of the State” and that “sound tax policy therefore requires time and expertise.”

Who has that expertise might you ask? Well, call the Legislature biased, but they claim that “California’s full-time Legislature has the capacity to implement tax policy because legislators can spend weeks in committees reviewing a law and debating its impact, all while being advised by professional legislative staff.” They say that the voters “have neither the time nor resources at their disposal to comprehensively study their crowded ballots.”

What a joke.