By now, we have all heard stories like Coulson’s—example after example of California’s draconian sentencing laws. The legislature more recently abandoned the most severe excesses that made us the mass incarceration capital of the country, exacerbated disparities, drained taxpayer resources and failed to make us safer. However, the legacy remains in the form of thousands of people serving life (or virtual life) sentences for nonviolent crimes—like Coulson.  Thousands more are serving lengthy sentences under other excessive sentencing regimes—the vestiges of the failed tough on crime era of the 1990s.

Today, California has the second largest prison population in the United States—nearly 100,000 Californians are currently incarcerated in our overcrowded state prisons (at an average annual cost of $106,000 per incarcerated person).  California also leads the nation in life sentences with 32% of the incarcerated population serving life or virtual life sentences, though researchers have found that lengthy sentences and high rates of incarceration have diminishing returns in reducing crime rates. 

Today, almost half of the people in California prisons have already served at least 10 years of their sentence. According to data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), 57% of all individuals in prison are rated “low risk” to reoffend.  88% of individuals in prison over 50 years old are “low risk,” and 95% of individuals that have served 20 or more years are “low risk.”  

Why do we keep spending so much to keep people in cages that pose a low risk to the rest of us? 

Recognizing both the significant cost and diminishing returns of excessively long sentences, the California Legislature has taken steps to safely and equitably release those whose continued incarceration is no longer in the interest of justice through “second look” resentencing.  Through this process, the court considers factors, including an incarcerated person’s age, physical and mental health, and conduct while in prison, to determine whether they would pose a risk to public safety if they were released and whether their continued incarceration is in the interest of justice.  Crime victims are also involved in the process and have the opportunity to provide their input. 

While the possibility of “second look” resentencing has existed in California law for decades, a series of recent bills has substantially improved the process and broadened its reach. New laws increase the number of authorities that can initiate resentencing to include the prosecuting attorney and provide additional funding to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (“CDCR”) to make resentencing referrals and recommendations. 

These changes in the law reflect the data demonstrating that criminal involvement diminishes dramatically after age 40 (even more so after age 50), that lengthy sentences do not deter crime, and that crime victims overwhelmingly favor reducing sentencing lengths for people in prison who are assessed as a low risk to public safety.

Coulson’s release is the product of “second look” resentencing.  He was recommended for release by CDCR based on his exceptional conduct while in custody and in recognition of the substantial portion of his sentence which he had already served.  A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge did not hesitate to act on CDCR’s recommendation, but a gap in the law means the court could not have acted on their own motion to remedy a punishment which, the judge said, “shocks the conscience and offends fundamental notions of human dignity.”  The Legislature is poised to fix that.

As Assemblymember Ting told me, “While I have successfully championed resentencing efforts, I know there’s room for improvement. There are potentially many more Californians like Mr. Coulson, whose extremely long sentences are unjustly harsh and deserve a ‘second look.’ My bill makes technical and procedural changes to current law to achieve fairness and equity in the application of such reviews – goals worth aiming for.”

Cristine DeBerry is the founder and executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance of California. 

As this column has previously revealed, all phases of the budget dance are fake insofar as they are subject to substantial amendments throughout the year by so-called “trailer bills” and “junior budget bills,” rendering what was for decades a rational process for fiscal planning into a never-ending convoluted outflow of taxpayer cash.

(The budget process was wholly perverted in 2010 by Proposition 25, laughingly labeled the “On-Time Budget Act of 2010.” Its real purpose was to repeal the two-thirds vote requirement for state budgets. Voters fell for the promise that budgets would be passed on time, with greater transparency and that legislators would forfeit their pay if the budget was late. Thirteen years later we now know that all three of these representations were lies.)

While the May Revise is not the final budget, it usually has the benefit of providing a bit more clarity as to the financial state of the state. But that may not be the case this year as explained below. As with previous May revisions, this one had a couple of surprises.

First, a pleasant surprise. Despite heavy pressure from far left progressives in the legislature and public sector labor organizations, the governor is not proposing any significant tax increases. So, despite the innumerable disagreements taxpayers have with Newsom, give some credit where credit is due, especially when the rejection was unequivocal: “I do not think it’s the right time to raise taxes, and I was crystal clear on that.”

The second surprise is not so pleasant: The May revise envisions even higher spending over that originally proposed in January. ($306.5 billion in total spending up from $297 billion.) More troubling is that fact that the projected deficit is $9 billion higher. ($31.5 billion deficit up from $22.5 billion projected in January.)

This is a surprise given that the odds of a recession are increasing according to most economists and California continues to spend at alarming levels. Just ten years ago, California’s general fund was $93 billion, which adjusted for inflation, would be $118 billion in today’s dollars. The state has long spent beyond its means, but the spending addiction is now in overdrive. No rational observer believes this trajectory is sustainable.

The third surprise in the May revision is the data we don’t have. Revenue projections are always tricky, and it often seems that budget planners would have more accurate projections using a Magic 8 Ball. But as difficult as it is in normal years projecting how much tax revenue will be generated, it is even more difficult this year. Because of several declared disasters, the filing deadline for most Californians is now in October, not on April 15th. Millions of Californians have yet to file their returns, making revenue projections even more speculative.

Both the budget process itself and the unsustainable level of government spending are bad for California. But it’s what we can expect with monolithic one-party control. And that’s no surprise at all.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

When Donald Trump eventually builds his presidential library, he’ll need a pavilion twice that size to hold the “Trump was Right” exhibit.

He might need two of them.

Special Counsel John Durham has released his “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” and it confirms that Trump was right when he called the investigation into alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia “a hoax.”

There never was any actual evidence, none at all, to support that allegation or the opening of an FBI investigation. None. Nothing. Zero.

In fact, there was evidence to the contrary, and the FBI ignored it. “It is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report states.

Trump was framed and the country was torn apart by vicious, false allegations of treasonous conduct by the duly elected president of the United States. Who was responsible?

Hillary Clinton did this, aided and abetted by a number of people in the government.

How high did it go? All the way to the top. In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Russian intelligence had picked up information alleging that Hillary Clinton had approved a proposal from one of her campaign advisors to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee, in order to distract from the investigation into her use of a private email server as Secretary of State.

According to his own notes, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama with that information on July 28, and on August 3 Brennan met with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey and other senior administration officials, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who participated remotely, to brief them on intelligence related to Russian interference and on the “Clinton Plan” intelligence.

So they all knew. The Durham report says the FBI “failed to act on what should have been — when combined with other incontrovertible facts — a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election.”

Exculpatory evidence, tending to establish innocence, was ignored, while Clinton-funded materials —the Steele Dossier, full of salacious and unverified claims, and false accusations that Trump shared a computer server with Alfa Bank in Russia—were treated as credible. Material from the Steele Dossier was even presented to the FISA court to back up a request for a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign advisor. The court was not told of its political origin.

“Put another way,” the Durham report states, “this [Clinton plan] intelligence — taken at face value — was arguably highly relevant and exculpatory because it could be read in fuller context, and in combination with other facts, to suggest that materials such as the Steele Dossier reports and the Alfa Bank allegations…were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective.”

That’s exactly what happened. And while it was going on, they all knew. It was a hoax. Trump was right.

This corrupt manipulation of the FBI and other government agencies for political purposes did not end with the Russia hoax and still continues today. Consider how our elections have been affected.

As voters went to the polls in 2018, the special counsel investigation into the baseless Trump-Russia allegations was dragging on. How many voters were influenced by the belief that Donald Trump had engaged in treasonous conduct with Russia? The Mueller report was finally released in April 2019, finding no conspiracy or collusion.

As voters went to the polls in 2020, the FBI was in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop, in full knowledge that it was authentic, and keeping silent while the Biden team rounded up misleading statements from former U.S. intelligence officials asserting that the laptop looked like Russian disinformation. Revelations from the Twitter files show government involvement in the suppression and censorship of the New York Post’s truthful reporting that the laptop contained email evidence that Biden was lying to the American people when he said repeatedly that he had no conversations with his son about his business dealings.

As voters went to the polls in 2022, they had recently seen images of a massive FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August, an unprecedented use of government force at the residence of a former president, suggesting some gravely serious violation of law and national security which has yet to be identified. But it wasn’t until February 2023 that Biden’s lawyers acknowledged that on November 2, before the election, they had found classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president in his office closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.

There were no police vehicles, no flashing red and blue lights, no news cameras for that discovery, or for subsequent discoveries at Biden’s Delaware home of illegally held classified documents from his time as VP and U.S. senator.

The abuses of power in the FBI are not limited to presidential candidates. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary subcommittee investigating the weaponization of government heard from three FBI whistleblowers whose lives and reputations have been devastated by improper retaliation. One had brought forth concerns about the tactics used against protesters arrested in connection with January 6th.

There must be accountability. This cannot continue.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

From CNN and MSNBC hosts to neoconservative war hawks to creeps in the so-called intelligence community to the grifters at the Lincoln Project, a lot of terrible people don’t like Trump.

And sure, the Democratic conspiracy theories about Trump being a Russian asset and the Russians successfully “hacking the election” were gibberish from the start.

And yes, many of Trump’s supporters are wrongly smeared and talked down to by elitist left-wing snobs who don’t care to understand why they support Donald Trump.

All of this said, Donald Trump is a malignant force in American politics who doesn’t deserve a second term in the White House.

A thought experiment

For one, Trump has obviously done things which if done by a Democrat would have Republicans frothing at the mouth.

Imagine, for example, if President Barack Obama lost the 2012 presidential election, spent every subsequent day insisting the election was stolen from him (and therefore the country was stolen from the American people), called at least one secretary of state demanding they “find the votes” to help change the results, held a “stop the steal” rally outside of the Capitol building as electoral votes were being counted and said nothing as his supporters stormed the Capitol building and assaulted police officers. Obama, in this scenario, would’ve also been angrily attacking Vice President Joe Biden for not violating the Constitution and throwing out electoral votes.

Then, imagine Obama kept things up, including calling for the “termination” of the Constitution. Separately, imagine Obama faced a possible criminal prosecution for the previously mentioned efforts to meddle in one of the state election counts and was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial.

Imagine how mad Republicans would be at Democrats who, amid all of this, made excuses for Obama, said it was all a Republican plot against him orchestrated by “the deep state.” And, besides, the economy was booming so all of Obama’s wrongs were totally fine. Just minor character flaws.

Go ahead, imagine that.

No really, think about it.

Seriously, meditate on it.

If you actually thought about that, my point has been made.

Trump is no conservative

Second, Trump has steered Republicans away from any coherent conservative philosophy.

Even before COVID, Trump blew up the national debt and didn’t care. His signature statement about fiscal matters: “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country.”

He abandoned conservative commitments to free trade in favor of abusing executive power to launch a trade war with longtime allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union because he seriously believed the following nonsense:  “Because of tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the” national debt, “while at the same time reducing taxes for our people.”

Trump evidently didn’t understand that the tariffs are in fact taxes “for our people,” that the main result of the tariffs was to undercut American companies and workers by raising costs to do business, and that tariff revenues were a drop in the bucket to the trillion-dollar deficits he approved every year as president.

And now, ironically, he’s running to the left of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by repeatedly hammering DeSantis for having previously supported reforms to America’s unsustainable entitlement programs. The trustees of Social Security and Medicare have long warned that both programs are facing insolvency, which will trigger significant benefit reductions if nothing is done. And doing nothing is exactly what Trump wants to do.

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he said in a video earlier this year.

Trump has instead floated as solutions cutting foreign aid and “left-wing gender programs in the military.” Yeah, no. That won’t make Medicare and Social Security solvent.

These fiscally and economically reckless ideas from Trump might be good politics for Trump in the short term, but they’re bad for the country and worse for the coherence of the Republican Party in the long term.

Trump is a loser

Americans gave him a shot in 2016 and have rejected him and his ilk ever since, which should tell you something.

In 2018, the “blue wave” wiped out Republican control of the House.

In 2020, Trump was ousted from the White House. He and his supporters were reduced to blaming everything from Venezuelan voting machines to phantom ballot-stuffing operations.

In 2021, Republicans managed to lose two Republican Senate seats in Georgia thanks to Trump’s temper tantrums, in turn losing control of the Senate.

In 2022, Trumpism stifled what should have been a “red wave” by yielding clowns like Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker as Senate candidates in key races, protecting the Democratic Senate and yielding a razor-thin Republican House majority.

Public opinion polling has consistently shown most Americans don’t want either Trump or President Biden to run again. They want someone new.

If you’re a Republican, a conservative, and you’re deeply worried about the woke leftists winning elections and taking the country to a bad place, shouldn’t you want a president who can actually, I don’t know, win? Because the backlash to Trump is what gave the country major victories for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The country needs better

A lot of pundits have complained in recent weeks about CNN’s town hall with Trump, saying he shouldn’t have been “platformed.” I disagree.

Like him or not, Donald Trump is an important political figure in the United States, and by extension the world. It’s important to know what he says and how he thinks.

Anyone who hasn’t been chugging the MAGA Kool-Aid, thanks to CNN, got to see and hear how remarkably incoherent and nutty Trump is. We got to see and hear Trump, right after being found liable for sexual abuse, attack the victim  on live television with complaints: “Her dog or her cat was named Vagina, the judge wouldn’t allow to put that in.”

We’re living in “Idiocracy” so long as he’s a powerful political force in America. And guess what? He is, so we are.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

One of the worst ideas I’ve reported on – and that’s saying something given that this is, after all, California – is redevelopment. On these pages today, we recount the history of that 1940s-era urban-renewal program. Designed to revive blighted cities, the agencies (RDAs) morphed in a central-planning tool that ran up debt, diverted tax dollars from traditional public services, showered subsidies on corporations and abused eminent domain on behalf of developers.

In particular, former Assemblyman Chris Norby of Fullerton, who played a key role in convincing former Gov. Jerry Brown to dissolve those agencies a dozen years ago, details the fiscal problems they caused. It hasn’t been that long since they’ve been gone, yet some lawmakers haven’t gotten the message. In the ensuing years, the Legislature reprised some aspects of it, by allowing cities to use a similar financing mechanism for a narrow range of projects.

This year, however, one bill tried to bring back redevelopment agencies in their entirety (albeit with some modest restrictions on eminent domain). When I first came to work for The Orange County Register in the 1990s, redevelopment was a very big deal. Its lobbyists had immense power in Sacramento and on city councils. I uncovered so many abuses – e.g., cities that seized small businesses and neighborhoods to make way for big-box stores – that I wrote a book about it.

Then in 2011, California faced massive budget deficits and Brown noticed that – because the state backfilled revenues the agencies diverted from public schools – redevelopment imposed a multibillion-dollar drain on the budget. Then poof, they were gone – and the courts affirmed the Legislature’s decision. They’ve been gone long enough that no one in the media seems to remember them.

This new redevelopment bill was moving through the Legislature, so this should have been front-page news. But my Google searches yielded nothing – no news stories or opinion pieces other than the ones that I personally had penned. One aspect of “eternal vigilance” is paying attention to the goings-on in the state Capitol. In fairness, a dozen years is an eternity in politics – and the state faces so many other challenges to our freedoms and wallets.

Fortunately, one of the state’s most-powerful lobbies, the California Teachers’ Association, was indeed paying attention. I’m a constant critic of this teachers’ union, which has done so much to turn California’s public schools from among the best in the nation to among the worst. Yet I was thrilled to hear that CTA helped kill the bill, even if it did so for obviously self-interested reasons.

“AB 1476 would divert local property taxes that currently go to schools to instead fund RDAs and would require the state to backfill schools to meet the Proposition 98 minimum guarantee,” the union wrote in a letter to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. And that was that. Other news events sealed the deal. You might have noticed, but California faces a $31.5-billion budget deficit, larger than the shortfall faced by Brown in 2011. The bill’s supporters had terrible timing.

Today’s special section recounts the legacy of redevelopment agencies because, although the latest effort to revive them is dead, some legislative slow-learner will almost certainly try to bring them back in a future session. Redevelopment posed a threat to one of our most precious freedoms – our property rights – so let’s be more vigilant next time. Suffice it to say, but it’s not the safest bet to rely on a teachers’ union to protect us.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute and a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Based on 1986 tax returns — so I didn’t get one — the rebates were from $32 to $236 and went to 13 million taxpayers.

Then in 1990 mistaken voters passed Proposition 111, which curtailed the Gann Limit and increased taxes. President Bush broke his 1988 solemn pledge at the Republican National Convention, “Read my lips, no new taxes!” As a result, that tipped the national economy into recession. Republican Pete Wilson was elected that year to be governor of California.

California slid down the roller-coaster budget cycle, causing a deficit of $12.6 billion. As the recession dug in, Wilson pushed for a $7.6 billion tax increase. In those days, Republicans in the Legislature were close to parity with Democrats, so some of their votes were needed to pass a tax increase.

The main holdout was Assemblyman Tom McClintock, later a state senator and now a U.S. congressman. Wilson reportedly “backed the defiant McClintock into a corner and angrily called him ‘[expletive] irrelevant.’” McClintock stood firm, but the tax increase passed anyway.

The tax increase didn’t work. Revenues actually dropped, from $42 billion in fiscal 1991-92 to $40.1 billion in 1993-94. Only after most of the tax increases fell off in 1995 did revenues rise again, to $46.3 billion in 1995-96.

By then California was in the midst of the dot-com boom. Revenues soared to $80.6 billion in 2002-03 — doubling in just nine years — and Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature, both Democratic, blew every penny of it. Spending rose from $57.9 billion in 1998-99 to $78.1 billion in 2000-01. A 35% increase in just two years.

Economists said we were in a new, recession-proof economy. But I wrote at least six editorials in the Register warning, “The business cycle has not been repealed.” The dot-com bust hit hard, sparking a deficit of $35 billion, and major cuts. That, and other failures such as the electricity crisis, laid the groundwork for Davis’ recall in 2003.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bounded into office that year promising to “blow up the boxes” of government waste. He held the line on spending in his first two years. Then in 2005 he lost a special election of four reform planks he pushed (of eight total), including teacher tenure reform and spending limits. After the loss, he terminated all fiscal caution.

General-fund spending soared again, from $79.8 billion in 2005-06 to $101.4 billion in 2007-08. That was $21.6 billion in new spending, a 27% increase in just two years.

The Great Recession slammed the Golden State in 2008. In his January 2009 State of the State address, Arnold groaned, “The $42 billion deficit is a rock upon our chest and we cannot breathe until we get it off.” He tried to do that with a record tax increase.

McClintock later branded it, “Schwarzenegger’s folly … The taxes were supposed to produce $13 billion in additional revenue. But after nine months, California’s sales tax collections are down $270 million; income tax collections are down $10 billion.” There also were big spending cuts.

That brings us to Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose nearly $100 billion surplus last year was another missed chance to reform state finances to tame the roller coaster. Although, under the Gann Limit, rebates up to $250 went to 23 million Californians. This time, I got one.

Now we have a $31.5 billion budget deficit, according to the May Revision of his budget proposal.

In the 1980s, when I drove out for fun in the sun, the state’s population boomed by 6 million. Now it’s shrinking. Perhaps there’s a connection.

John Seiler is on the SCNG editorial board. Email: writejohnseiler@gmail.com

The wider adoption of the term Common-Good Capitalism (CGC) can be traced back to a speech given by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, at Catholic University in 2019. While there are different strains of common-good capitalism, they all have in common the goal of producing a more balanced and stable economy that better serves the nation and its people.

The common good is, of course, a vague and subjective concept, the details of which are hard to pin down. Its advocates claim it’s an alternative form of conservative governance meant to promote things like tradition, workers’ dignity, religion, order and families, rather than the singular free-market focus of personal liberties and economic freedom. How exactly government policies will be used to mold capitalism into achieving these goals — many of which go further than economics — is unclear. This haziness explains why those defending common-good capitalism usually do so only by listing what they see as wrong with the free market, rather than by giving their audiences specific details.

For instance, common-good advocates’ complaints about no-prefix capitalism often include excessive income inequality caused by greedy, cosmopolitan capitalists who heartlessly offshore jobs to low-wage foreign countries, or gripes about corporations somehow simultaneously charging monopolistically high prices that hurt consumers and low prices that threaten small firms and damage local communities. I wouldn’t blame you if you thought these complaints were coming from the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

While I don’t dismiss some of their complaints about the underperformance of the economy — specifically the hardships suffered by some workers and families — common-good capitalists make the same mistakes as their counterparts on the left. They start by mistaking problems caused by government intervention for problems inherent in the free market. They end by offering up even more government interventions as supposed solutions.

It’s striking to listen to CGC advocates act as if today’s markets have been freed of all the fetters that I and other advocates of small government have warned about for decades. The size and scope of the government say otherwise. With $31 trillion in debt, more than $6 trillion in annual federal government spending and a future 30-year government shortfall of $114 trillion, it’s ludicrous to assert that the dominant governing philosophy in Washington over the past 50 years has been Milton Friedman-style market theory. Also contradicting the common-good capitalists’ mythmaking is the well-documented burden imposed by the regulatory state at all levels of government.

But rather than demanding fewer government-erected barriers to exchange, employment and housing affordability, the CGC crowd wants tariffs to obstruct consumers’ access to inexpensive imports. They want to line the pockets of the firms they favor while punishing those they dislike.

Further, these “capitalists” want to forbid the business practices that they think favor capital over labor, when in reality capital fuels innovation, hiring and higher wages. And they want to make families artificially dependent on government design with policies such as federal mandated paid leave and extended child tax credits. These policies, of course, are favored also by the left.

At every turn, common-good capitalism implies a greater role for government in regulating and directing the market to achieve the fancies of common-good capitalists. Who truly believes that such interventions won’t result in more inefficiency, corruption and political capture by special interests? I don’t. I also worry that common-good capitalists won’t be interested in balancing the rights and the freedoms of those persons who disagree with their economic and social designs.

Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

With the myriad problems facing Californians – housing crisis, homelessness crisis, public education crisis, affordability crisis, declining population, lack of water, worsening wildfires and a massive budget deficit – it seems like the last thing they should be concerning themselves with is personality conflicts in the Tennessee Statehouse.

But that’s one of the things they wasted time on this week.

The resolution centered on an incident on April 6 where two Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee were expelled for bringing the House’s proceeds to a halt by protesting with bullhorns what they perceived was a lack of action on gun-control legislation.

Republicans have a supermajority in the Tennessee House and the vote to expel passed easily. Expulsion went too far and the lawmakers have since been reinstated.

And while it’s perfectly reasonable for California’s lawmakers to support the Tennessee lawmakers on their own time, it’s nonsense to waste the state’s time discussing it.

The resolution’s author, Assemblyman Mike Gipson, D-Los Angeles, said it was a matter of “democracy.”

“We cannot have our democracy eroded,” Gipson said, according to KCRA. “We will stand up for the voiceless. We will stand up for the disenfranchised.”

Of course, elected officials in Tennessee are neither voiceless nor disenfranchised. And shutting down democratic proceedings to seek attention with a bullhorn is itself an erosion of democracy.

But what makes Gipson’s resolution so ridiculous is that it overlooked the anti-democratic actions his Democratic supermajority constantly pulls.

What prompted the Tennessee Democratic lawmakers to pull a stunt like that in the first place is that they are stuck in a legislative superminority with no power to control the agenda in any way.

You know who is in a similar situation? California Republicans in the Assembly. But I don’t remember Gipson introducing a resolution supporting them.

“Bottom line: If we want to ensure democracy then we better do it right here at home,” Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher said on the floor, noting that routinely Republicans are silenced when urging action on “crisis issues like wildfires and fentanyl and kids dying.”

Gipson is right that the tyranny of an oppressive supermajority does threaten democracy. But so does taking a stand only when it’s politically convenient.

Justin Jones, one of the Tennessee lawmakers, was on hand for the proceedings. When asked by a reporter whether supermajorities are good for democracy, he dodged the question. But what he offered was even more illuminating.

“I was not allowed to speak. I had my microphone shut off. I was not allowed to be recognized on the floor. That is what I was dealing with in my state,” Jones said, according to KCRA.

Sounds like a day in the life of Republicans in the California legislature!

Jones must not have been around when a Democratic Assemblyman, Roger Hernandez, actually had the mic of Matthew Harper, a Republican colleague, physically removed from the table in front of him. Or when a Republican senator, Janet Nguyen, was removed from the Senate floor for speaking against the chamber honoring someone who supported communist control of her homeland, Vietnam.

Hopefully Jones got to hang around a few more days to enjoy what’s known as the suspense file, where hundreds of bills are summarily killed by the whims of a Democratic committee chair without so much as a hearing or vote.

Again, Jones and his colleagues were wrong for bringing a bullhorn and protest to session, and Tennessee Republicans were wrong for expelling them. But it’s hard to imagine California Assembly Democrats’ reacting substantially differently if California’s Republican Assemblymembers used a bullhorn during debate.

Ironically, one of the members debating the resolution, Assemblyman Alex Lee, D-San Jose, tweeted recently: “It always baffles me that part-time legislatures are adjourning for the legislative session while CA we barely are done with first committees. How do you jam in so much work so quickly??”

Lee tweeted that just as he embarked on a European trip in the middle of the legislative session.

Anyway, hypocrisy breeds cynicism. Gallagher is right: If California Democrats are serious about promoting democracy, start in California. It’s not like interparty bickering in the Tennessee State House is a kitchen-table issue in California.

To Californians who feel like the state government is not responding to crises with the appropriate sense of urgency, this does nothing to help matters.

And to Californians who think the state government is working hard to solve the state’s problems, hopefully this raises some questions about the collective judgment of the Democratic supermajority.

Follow Matt on Twitter @FlemingWords

Which, of course, Californians are naturally worried about, now that we’ve seen the state the powerful longtime senator is in even after returning to Washington from her San Francisco manse.

“Using a wheelchair, with the left side of her face frozen and one eye nearly shut, she seemed disoriented as an aide steered her through the marble corridors of the Senate, complaining audibly that something was stuck in her eye,” as The New York Times reported on Thursday. That paper also broke the news that the senator had also contracted encephalitis, which had previously not been reported.

It’s an odd position to be in, being more concerned about the well-being of an influential, important person now that we’ve seen her out and about than even before, when she was confined to quarters for months and reportedly quite ill and no one got to see her.

Still and all, it’s her call about soldiering on, and she likely will.

She made it back to the Judiciary Committee to cast those crucial votes she’d been missing that were holding up some of President Biden’s federal judge nominees — you know, the three people who Sen. Ted Cruz, after welcoming his colleague back to the committee, said were “several nominees who are so extreme, who are so unqualified that they could not have a prayer of getting even a single Republican vote on this committee.”

And I just wondered: are they that? So extreme, so unqualified?

The three, who Feinstein’s vote moved out of committee, are Charnelle Bjelkengren of Washington state, S. Kato Crews of Colorado and Marian Gaston of California.

Bjelkengren’s B.A. from Mankato State University (now Minnesota State University) was given cum laude in 1997 and she took her J.D. from Gonzaga University School of Law in 2000. From 2001 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2013, she was an assistant attorney general in Washington and, and then she served as an administrative law judge there. Since 2019, she’s a judge on the Spokane County Superior Court. OK, so she’s qualified. Extreme? Well, it looks like Cruz and Mitch McConnell are hanging their hats on her inability to answer some gotcha questions from Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, including what purposivism is. Verdict: not extreme.

Crews is a magistrate judge of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, and now is Biden’s nominee to serve as a district judge of the same court. B.A., University of Northern Colorado; J.D., University of Arizona, where he served on the Arizona Law Review. Worked in private practice for years, including in labor and real estate law, before becoming a judge four years ago. Extremism? Again, he was set up by Kennedy and couldn’t say what the 1963 precedent known as a Brady motion. Bet he knows what it is now.

Glad DiFi showed to move these qualified, unextreme judges to the full Senate. Hope she gets entirely well, soon.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

And that deja vu is precisely what crashed over me like a wave last week when former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole called to tell me he was running for City Council again next year, four decades on from when he first did.

In District 2, the same Bungalow Heaven-centric neighborhood that he captured as a young buck in 1983 in a low-budget, high-energy campaign based on a simple tactic that smart candidates have adopted ever since then: He personally knocked on every door in the district. Every.

And he won, while still in his 20s, defeating one-term incumbent Stephen Acker, a moderate Republican who was doing a fine job but probably just didn’t know what hit him when Cole ran such an unusual campaign to get a seat on what had been a relatively sleepy City Council until then.

“What in the world!” I exclaimed to Rick, who I have known since I was a senior in high school, when he, who had graduated from Blair High two years earlier, was working as an aide to Pasadena’s genius, go-getter superintendent of schools, Ramon Cortines.

“Next thing you’re going to tell me is that Bill Paparian and Isaac Richard — now Isaac Haqq — are going to run again, too! That Don McIntyre is going to come back as city manager, followed by Phil Hawkey! They both still love Pasadena and City Hall politics! I mean, I’ve heard of ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia, but this is getting ridiculous!”

Rick had to just suffer through my incredulity, with a laugh. I was working out of town and on another line and hadn’t originally picked up when he called. He had to text me a photo of his Candidate Intention Statement to fully get my attention.

And then he sent a YouTube campaign video, which I recommend all San Gabriel Valley politicos check out at RickCole4Council.com as a masterful four minutes of brilliant propaganda — er, campaign advertising — that tugs at the heartstrings and makes a person want to serve on, well, city commissions or something. “I love Pasadena,” he says at the outset, strolling the Bungalow Heaven sidewalks, in the charming neighborhood he has recently returned to after serving as city manager of Azusa, and then Ventura and then Santa Monica — as well as deputy mayor of Los Angeles, and now chief deputy controller of that metropolis.

“In a changing world, cities can’t stand still,” he continues. “Pasadena used to be a leader, setting the example for other cities to follow. Yet today, city government has settled for the status quo. … City Hall seems to have forgotten that our General Plan says that community participation will be a permanent part of achieving a greater city.”

What Rick doesn’t note there is that he wrote those words into the General Plan when he was mayor, and then had them approved by Pasadena voters citywide.

As Rick is never shy about reminding reporters, he was a newspaper guy himself, and has a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.

Anyway, this is going to be fun. Local politics are a lot quieter now than in the era in which 20-something Rick jumped in and shook things up. Nearing 70, he’s issued a challenge to other local politicos to once again go big, to “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood,” in Daniel Burnham’s stirring words. Stay tuned for what are going to be interesting times in our area’s biggest City Hall.

 Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.