Weekend wonkery… Help us choose state bills to follow!

Action – Help nominate bills for CA StateStrong to push through to the finish line!

The Indivisible coalition “CA State Strong” is choosing important grassroots bills to follow and promote through our state’s complicated legislative process and Indivisible Ventura has the opportunity to send in 10 of our favorites for consideration. Check here for this year’s crop of new legislative proposals. Email your picks to indivisibleventura@gmail.com by end of day Monday, 2/25 (if you have an explanation why a bill is so important to you, send that too) and we’ll send them in. Yes, even for the perpetual civics class we now live in, this IS an extremely wonky activity.

You know who you are…

Background – “Why don’t you guys follow EVERYTHING?”

The deadline for state legislators to submit new bills for the 2019-2020 session was last Friday, Feb. 22nd, and there are now 1799 proposed Assembly (AB) bills, 10 Assemby Constitutional amendments, 42 Assembly Concurrent Resolutions and 777 Senate (SB) bills on the list for consideration. That’s almost 3000 moving parts, all working their way through this monster chutes and ladders game…

Indivisible groups already work together to promote really great bills and stop the evil ones before their FINAL votes in either house. But there are lots of dead ends on the road to the governor’s desk for even the best legislation. “Following” means that certain bills are monitored by a dedicated group from the starting gate. When necessary, they help muster last-minute grassroots support to push them through committees and out of inactive files in time to meet all their deadlines.

Last year, CA StateStrong followed a number of bills, including these:

• AB 3131: Police military equip – passed both houses and was vetoed by Brown
• SB 822: Net neutrality – Passed. Currently in dogfight with FCC.
• AB 84: Bad campaign finance – Died in the Senate
• AB 813: Bad energy grid bill – Died in the Senate
• more history – (successes, vetoes, dead bills) here.

You can pick bills by cruising through the whole list, or searching by author, (like our own legislators, Assemblymember Monique Limón, or Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson) or by subject, like “guns”, “environment”, or “education”. If you belong to a group, like Courage Campaign, 350 Bay Area, ACLU, Health Access, California Immigrant Policy Center, American Friends Service Committee, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Asian Law Caucus, Climate Hawks Vote, Food & Water Watch  or SEIU, check to see if they are co-sponsoring bills.

Never researched a bill on the CA legislative website before? Go here for some pointers.

CA StateStrong wants to emphasize bills that will need the most grassroots support to make it through the legislative process, that resist the Trump agenda and protect and expand democracy here in CA, where we have the most power. Leaders are currently interested in ACA 6, – Free the vote, which restores voting rights to people on parole, SB29/AB4 –Health4All, which expands Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants and AB 392 – Peace officers: deadly force, which changes when the police can use deadly force.

What we do here in CA is important. It affects the whole country – we have 12% of the population, the 5th biggest economy, other states copy us, we provide an alternative to the DC narrative and we demand accountability of our legislators. So join in and see what our legislators have been up to.