The fight to keep LegalZoom.com in Los Angeles was a compelling story. After all, it’s refreshing and fairly rare to see City Hall work with business groups in a business-friendly way.

Los Angeles can seem numbingly inured to the routine in which businesses often leave the city because of high costs, while City Hall seems not to care. But about 18 months ago, when LegalZoom started making noises about moving, it was as if the community stood together and said, “No, not this one. Not this time.”

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, City Council President Eric Garcetti and the Mayor’s Office, among others, worked together for months to come up with a way to keep LegalZoom tethered to Los Angeles.

The group’s task was a clear one: They only had to figure a solution or a compromise to a high tax rate that LegalZoom and some similar Internet businesses suddenly had to pay.

At a time when 2.26 million Californians are searching for
work and our economy is on life support, Democrats and Republicans should be
doing everything they can to encourage new investment and jobs in our
state.  But when given the chance
to foster a stronger economy, Sacramento Democrats said no.

Last week, I presented Assembly Bill 1833, common-sense
legislation that I co-authored with Assembly Republican Leader Martin Garrick,
to require state agencies to first conduct an independent economic analysis of
a proposed new or revised state regulation before it takes effect.  Our bill would simply require
bureaucrats to weigh the impacts of new regulations on California jobs and post
the information online.  It would
not block or repeal any regulations needed to protect the public.

When presented the opportunity to pass responsible reforms
to stimulate the economy and spur job creation, the Democrats on the Assembly
Business, Professions, and Consumer Protection Committee killed our proposal on
a party-line vote.  They joined
with union bosses to crush a bill that was meant to protect small businesses
and restore our economy, ignoring the mounting evidence that costly
regulations are driving jobs away to other states.

The United States income tax structure is starting to look like the California income tax structure and that is not a good thing. California should be a lesson for federal tax planners. Relying more and more on the “rich” to carry the tax burden subjects the treasury to wild swings in revenue. That is something we experienced too often in the Golden State, as the economy goes through ups and downs.

There is also a question of fairness in who pays the bills for government services. Everyone should pay something to provide for government. People should not be dropped completely off the tax rolls, nor should there be loopholes for the wealthy taxpayers to escape all tax obligations.

On this tax day, state officials will be hoping for a rush of income tax returns to help pull California out of its deficit hole. But when approximately 144,000 income tax filers pay 50% of the state income tax, the tax structure is built on a rickety foundation.

Justice Stevens announced his retirement last week.  Now the sixty-four thousand dollar
question: Who will President Obama appoint to replace him?  Some might believe that the answer to
this question is not important because everyone knows that the President will
just replace a liberal with a liberal, but they would be wrong.  The key question is not what the new
justice’s policy orientation is; rather, the question of most concern to me,
and that should be of most concern to us all, is whether the new justice will
be dedicated to the rule of law, or will add fuel to a disturbing trend in the
judiciary of placing policy ahead of objective decision-making.  The choice is crucial because I believe
that the commitment to follow the law as interpreted by our judiciary will be
jeopardized if Americans come to believe that judicial decisions are nothing
more than lawmaking based on the justice’s policy preferences, behind a phony
mask of legal interpretation.

From his actions thus far, I fear that President Obama will
make the wrong choice.  In his
State of the Union Address last January, the President criticized the Supreme
Court’s decision in Citizens United,
where the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment guarantee of free
speech-"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of
speech"-prohibits Congress from silencing corporations during elections.  Although I agree with the Supreme
Court’s reasoning in that case, I would not have been alarmed had the President
merely disagreed with the Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment.  I have certainly criticized my share of
Supreme Court opinions.  But what
alarms me is that the President never mentioned the First Amendment-or the
Constitution for that matter.

Yesterday, Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher (R-“Rock Star”-San Diego) introduced “Chelsea’s Law” – targeted legislation that would provide a new one-strike life without parole penalty for those sexually violent predators who commit the most heinous of violent sex crimes against a child. The law includes lifetime parole with active GPS monitoring for those convicted of felony sex crimes involving physical contact with children and “safe zones” where sex offenders may not go.

Fletcher calls the legislation “a first step in a long term commitment to better protect our children…focused on the worst of the worst, the most dangerous and most likely to re-offend…the ones likely to pose the greatest risk to our children.”

Fletcher’s law, AB 1844, is a disciplined legislative proposal named for 17-year old Poway High School student Chelsea King, who disappeared on March 25th after going for a run in a local park. Law enforcement and thousands of volunteers searched for days until they finally found her in a shallow grave at Lake Hodges – a victim of unspeakable terror having been raped and murdered.

A new law, which might take the prize for the worst piece of legislation in 2009, requires nearly 200,000 California businesses to register and file use tax payments with the Board of Equalization (BOE) by April 15th. This onerous regulation will cost more to comply with – because of the unbelievable inconvenience it causes business owners – than the state will make in revenue.

The new law requires all business owners with gross revenue over $100,000, that are not already registered with the BOE, to register for a use tax account and file use tax returns for 2007, 2008, 2009, and for every year in the future.

That’s right: three years of filings will be due on the same day taxpayers must file state and federal income tax and payroll taxes.

AB 4x 18 was signed into law in July 2009. The Board rushed to begin implementation in November 2009, but many businesses received the news as late as mid-March 2010, and more have yet to be notified. If you haven’t received a letter and your business makes over $100,000 in gross revenue, it is your responsibility to register and file use tax returns by April 15th.

An interesting editorial in the Los
Angeles Times yesterday in which the Times editorial board charged that the
Steve Cooley for Attorney General campaign boasted about an earlier negative
Times editorial on Cooley under the assumption that if the Times says Cooley is
bad, he must be okay.

All the hammering the mainstream media has received over the
last couple of decades, certainly some justified, has set up a scenario for
many readers that if a newspaper says one thing, believe the opposite. 

Yesterday’s Times editorial recognized the inherent
contradiction in trying to analyze the motives of this reverse psychology:

Every time I read about the Large Hadron Collider, the huge new particle accelerator in Switzerland where they’re crashing protons together to make black holes so physicists can learn more about the nature of the universe, I think of Jerry Brown.

And not merely because of his interest in advanced technology. Brown is capable of creating vacuums all by himself.

The latest exhibit is the Chamber of Commerce’s now-withdrawn ad about Brown’s first governorship. Now let’s be clear: the ad was fundamentally dishonest. It criticized Brown for opposing Prop 13 but then blamed him for big increases in state spending and a state deficit that were the direct result of Prop 13. The chamber should have picked a lane.

But – and this is a big but – there was no small measure of justice in this injustice to the Brown campaign. The fact that Jerry Brown can be attacked this way is Jerry Brown’s fault.

It is a truth universally
acknowledged that President
Reagan’s immigration package would have no chance of passing in today’s
hyper-partisan climate regardless of who controls Congress.  Most members of the Gipper’s own party now
refer to it as the dirty word "amnesty" while a majority of their esteemed
colleagues wonder how to couple a pathway to citizenship with tougher
enforcement measures.  But whether
it is former Rep. Tom Tancredo’s pride, Poizner’s perceived immigrant
prejudice or simply the anger of a different kind of afternoon tea party,
chances are slim that comprehensive immigration reform will happen in 2010.

Despite promises to many in the
immigrant rights community, especially Latinos that came out for him in droves
in 2008, the Obama administration appears reluctant to wage another big public
policy battle.  Overhauling our
national immigration system and creating a new national energy policy were supposed
to be next in line.  But if the
punditocracy thought the political capital credit card was maxed out after the
bruising battle over healthcare, now the Senate and Team Obama will be consumed
over the summer on winning confirmation of a new Supreme Court nominee.  And there is no way either side,
despite the bipartisanship
of Senators Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Lindsay Graham (R-South
Carolina), will go anywhere near immigration going into the final stretch of
the election season.