California’s once-exemplary legislature now manages to be both trivial and destructive.
In January, California governor Jerry Brown, responding to one of the worst droughts in the state’s history, declared a state of emergency. The state legislature, though, didn’t get around to passing an emergency drought-relief bill until the end of February. But California’s lower house, the state assembly, did find time to pass a bill in January sponsored by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, an Alameda Democrat, directing the Department of Corrections to provide condoms to prison inmates. A virtually identical bill passed the state senate last year, which Brown vetoed. The governor apparently thought it logically perverse to provide free condoms to inmates when sex between prisoners remains a felony under state law.
Bonta’s efforts are characteristic of today’s hyperactive California legislature, which has developed a bad habit of passing laws (and lots of them) that ignore the state’s crises and sometimes make them worse—or even cause problems in the first place. Other early 2014 legislation was just as ridiculous as Bonta’s bill. With no rain in sight, and a state economy struggling with high unemployment and entrenched poverty, lawmakers passed one measure that required chefs and bartenders to wear gloves and another that regulated the appearance of toy guns. State Senator Mark Leno and Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, Democrats both, are coauthoring a bill to demand mandatory “kill switches” on all smartphones sold in the state.
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