Budget game theory
As the calendar moves toward the Legislature’s June 15 deadline for passing a budget and the June 30 expiration of billions of dollars in temporary taxes, pressure is building on Democrats to cut a deal with Republicans, on mostly Republican terms.
Republican leaders have already said they would go along with calling a special election on the taxes if Democrats will accept a series of reform the GOP lawmakers are pushing.
If a handful of Republicans will also vote to extend the taxes from July 1 until Election Day, they will be able to extract maximum concessions from the Democrats.
But if June 30 comes and goes and there is still no deal, much of that Republican leverage will disappear.
Brave New World of Government Rules
The meetings of the California Division of Occupational
Safety and Health usually aren’t one of the state’s hottest tickets, but boy,
was Tuesday an exception.
In one of those only in California events, Cal/OSHA
officials held a public
hearing to discuss requiring actors in porno films to use condoms.
Or, as the state bureaucrats would
have it, "each employer having any employees with occupational exposure as
defined by subsection (b) of this section shall establish, implement and
maintain an effective Exposure Control Plan which is designed to eliminate or
minimize employee exposure and which is also consistent with Section 3203."
It’s Christmas in California
It’s only June, but it sure seems like Christmas morning with the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission dropping new maps into stockings all over California today.
While the full impact on the GOP won’t be known for a few days (or a few months, if you believe the Commission that this is only a “first draft”), interesting races are emerging. Aside from a lump of coal or two delivered to coastal GOP State Senate districts, there are two new interesting districts in Southern California yielding fresh GOP blood that will prove to be particularly exciting.
South Bay – Los Angeles
The first is the newly-drawn district across the South Bay communities of Los Angeles. You may remember Nathan Mintz, the South Bay Tea Party founder and dynamic twenty-something aerospace engineer who ran a respectable campaign against the far-left’s trial attorney lobbyist Betsy Butler last fall. While Nathan fell short of victory in that matchup, he came closer to winning than any candidate in recent history – by a long shot. (In case you were wondering, the last Republican to run in that district won approximately zero precincts.) And today, it’s a whole new ballgame.
Be a Part of the Public Voice in Redistricting’s Final Push
Summer is now upon us, and Californians
have yet another reason to be excited: everyday citizens have a chance this
season to help decide the future of the Golden State. Today, California’s
Citizens Redistricting Commission will release draft maps for California’s
state Senate, state Assembly and congressional districts. Over the next two
months, Californians can tell commissioners who we are and how we’d like
to be represented.
For the first time in the state’s
history, the lines are being drawn by a citizen’s commission, based on
extensive public input. This public-driven process is an important reflection
of a long-held desire by Californians to determine our collective fate –
whether at the ballot box or at the community level. Public input has played
and will continue to play a crucial role in making the redistricting process
transparent and representative of all of California’s diverse constituencies.