This Week Inside the Capitol August 4, 2010

August 4, 2010

Tuesday afternoon, Senate pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Assembly Speaker John Pérez announced a budget blueprint that has at least the Democratic leaders on the same page; even before it was unveiled, however, the governor’s spokesman said it was a tax increase, and “tax increases are dead-on-arrival.”

Missing from the proposal is the controversial, legally questionable borrowing plan previously touted by Perez, and the Democrats admit to a need for some spending cuts. Yet, in their eagerness to protect safety-net childcare and welfare services and education, they have retained plans for an oil severance tax and a delay for corporate tax breaks. The centerpiece of their new plan is a convoluted tax swap that Democrats say would offset rises in income and car taxes with a reduced sales tax and federal deductions. “Bottom line,” Steinberg told columnist George Skelton, “is that the tax cut and the deductible would be more than the tax increase. And the federal government would pay for the deductible.” Senate Republican leader Dennis Hollingsworth (R-Murrieta) disagrees. “We looked at it with some interest. But once we ran the numbers, there was no way to accomplish what the Democrats wanted without a massive tax increase. Their assumptions are faulty.”

Seven weeks after the constitutional deadline to pass a budget, majority Democrats have finally introduced a unified plan – one that both the governor and Republican leaders have rejected as “sticking it to the taxpayers,” who just last year rejected the tax-and-spend approach to budgeting. Meanwhile, California Controller John Chiang has released a list of the payments he says California cannot pay in August and has warned that he will be forced to issue state IOUs at the end of the month without a budget in place.

As legislators returned to the Capitol on Monday, the delinquent budget was on everyone’s mind, and legislators began the final month of the 2009-2010 session with appropriations hearings. This week and next, hundreds of bills will face the scrutiny of fiscal committees. Bills that are approved in committee must then pass a final floor vote prior to the August 31 end-of-session deadline. With the advent of September, the focus will be on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who must sign, veto, or allow legislation to become law without his signature by the end of September.  

Governor Schwarzenegger already has signed several bills on CFC’s watch list, and other bills on our radar await a final house vote before moving on for the governor’s action. Bills on the floor of either the Senate or the Assembly, which include Sen. Mark Leno’s civil marriage bill (SB 906), can be heard at any time.  

SB 1253 (Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks) – would prohibit a paroled sex offender from living within half a mile from a minor victim – unless the victim is a member of the parolee’s household. 

SB 1279 (Pavley, D-Santa Monica) – would authorize a pilot program to help commercially sexually exploited minors in Los Angeles County, identical to a program currently operating in Alameda County.

AB 2380 (Lowenthal, D-Long Beach) – would redefine “reasonable suspicion” for mandated child-abuse reporters as not including certainty that abuse or neglect has occurred nor does it require a specific medical indication of abuse or neglect.

A Field Poll in mid-July found California voters continue to give both the governor and the Legislature very low marks. Only 16 percent of those surveyed agree with the way the Legislature is doing its job and 79 percent believe the state is seriously on the wrong track. Governor Schwarzenegger’s approval rate of 22 percent – his lowest yet – ties that of former Governor Gray Davis shortly before he was recalled in 2003. 

Signs throughout the nation point to a people dissatisfied with their elected representatives, many of whom have been ushered out in recent elections in other states. As November approaches, there is hope and expectancy for real change – not a trumped-up, empty political promise, but a movement of the people, by the people, and for the people. Remember November 2, 2010, an election that with your help can serve to reshape our nation and our state and head us once more in a better direction.

SB 203 (Harmon, R-Costa Mesa) – Current law criminalizes the distribution of obscene matter and child pornography. SB 203 would add the making of materials available for access or possession over the Internet to the definition of distribution. 
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 543 (Leno, D-San Francisco) – would allow minors to seek mental health treatment without parental knowledge or consent. 
Assembly floor (inactive file)

SB 677 (Yee, D-San Francisco) – would allow for the property seizure of those convicted of human trafficking.
Passed Assembly Appropriations Committee 17-0
Assembly floor (consent)

SB 834 (Florez, D-Bakersfield) – would allow a court to prohibit communication between a convicted sex offender and a minor victim.
Passed Assembly Public Safety Committee 7-0
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 840 (Yee, D-San Francisco) – Current law requires an observer of a murder, rape, or certain other serious crimes, accompanied by force – where the victim is under age 14 – to report the observed crime to the police. SB 840 expands this to where the victim is under the age of 18. 
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 906 (Leno, D-San Francisco) – would create a new class of marriage – “civil” marriage, likely an incremental precursor to redefining what marriage is. Assembly floor

SB 962 (Liu, D-Glendale) – would allow incarcerated parents – who have waived their right to attend the hearing terminating their parental rights – to view the hearing via videoconferencing. SB 962 would also allow the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to accept donated materials and services to implement a program for the participation of incarcerated parents in dependency court hearings.
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 1064 (Alquist, D-San Jose) – would make changes, including requiring the creation of a succession plan, to the stem-cell agency created by voters with Proposition 71 in 2004.
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 1204 (Runner, R-Lancaster) – would prevent convicted sex offenders from opening accounts with – or participating on – any social networking sites, and would require them to report their e-mail addresses, online addresses, and instant-messaging aliases to law enforcement. 
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 1253 (Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks) – would prohibit a paroled sex offender from living within half a mile from a minor victim – unless the victim is a member of the parolee’s household.
Signed into Law

SB 1279 (Pavley, D-Santa Monica) – would authorize a pilot program to help commercially sexually exploited minors in Los Angeles County, identical to a program currently operating in Alameda County.
Signed into Law

SB 1317 (Leno, D-San Francisco) – would hold a parent criminally responsible for the chronic truancy of a child over six years of age in grades 1-8. Misdemeanor crime could be punishable by a fine up to $2,000, one-year imprisonment, or both.  
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SB 1451 (Yee, D-San Francisco) – requires the California State Board of Education to review proposed textbooks for content deemed to result from Texas’ recent action – and to insure that the materials satisfy guidelines in current California law. The bill would also require the board to keep the Secretary of Education, and the chairmen of both the Senate and Assembly education policy committees informed of this information.
Assembly Appropriations Committee August 4, 9:00 a.m.

SCR 76 (Corbett, D-San Leandro) – would proclaim the Legislature’s support of human-trafficking awareness events and encourage Californians to become aware of the problem of human trafficking and work to eradicate the criminal practice. 
In Assembly

SJR 28 (Kehoe, D-San Diego) – would urge the Congress and the President of the United States to enact legislation to have the 2020 Census gather data on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Assembly Judiciary Committee, August 10

AB 33 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara) – part of a package of bills to enable quicker law enforcement response time in the event of reported missing children, AB 33 would require the Department of Justice’s Violent Crime Information Center’s investigative support unit to release a list of registered sex offenders in the proximity within two hours of a child reportedly abducted by a stranger. AB 33 would also require the development of policies, checklists, and guidelines for dealing with the investigation of missing persons. 
Senate Appropriations Committee Suspense file

AB 34 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara) – part of a package of bills to enable quicker law enforcement response time in the event of reported missing children, AB 34 would require the release of certain information to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to assist in the search for the missing person or persons. If the missing person is under age 21 – and there is evidence the person is at risk – within two hours the law enforcement agency will send the report to the Department of Justice for inclusion in the Violent Crime Information Center and the National Crime Information Center databases.
Senate Appropriations Committee Suspense file

AB 52 (Portantino, D-Pasadena) – would request – to the extent adequate federal funding is available – the University of California to establish the Umbilical Cord Blood Collection Program to collect and store blood for public use, transplantation, and specified research.
Senate Health Committee August 4, 1:30 p.m.

AB 1022 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara) – part of a package of bills to enable quicker law enforcement response time in the event of reported missing children, AB 1022 would establish a director position within the Department of Justice to help law enforcement agencies with the search and recovery of at-risk abducted children, and maintaining up-to-date knowledge and expertise of the best methods and technologies to recover missing children.
Senate Appropriations Committee Suspense file

AB 1841 (Buchanan, D-San Ramon) – would conform California law with federal law, which prohibits a public agency from continuing to provide special education or related services to a child whose parents or guardian have withdrawn their consent in writing.
Senate floor

AB 1844 (Fletcher, R-San Diego) – known as Chelsea’s Law, this bill would provide increased potential punishments for sexual crimes when the victim is a minor. 
Senate Appropriations Committee

AB 2199 (Lowenthal, D-Long Beach) – would delete state code sections that require research into the causes and cures of homosexual behavior.
Senate Appropriations Committee

AB 2380 (Lowenthal, D-Long Beach) – would redefine “reasonable suspicion” for mandated child-abuse reporters as not including certainty that abuse or neglect has occurred nor does it require a specific medical indication of abuse or neglect.
Signed into Law

AB 2416 (Cook, R-Yucaipa) – Current law provides that a party's absence, relocation, or failure to comply with custody and visitation orders is not, by itself, sufficient to justify modification of a custody or visitation order if the failure is due to activation to military service and deployment out of state. AB 2416 would expand this provision to cover additional military-related deployments. 
Senate floor

AB 2426 (Bradford, D-Inglewood) – would define and regulate “surrogacy facilitators,” and require non-attorney surrogacy facilitators to direct clients to deposit client faith funds into an independent, bonded escrow account or a trust account maintained by an attorney.
Assembly concurred in Senate amendments 77-0
To enrollment

AB 2444 (Furutani, D-Long Beach) – would require that – if a district has an enrolled student, per a transfer agreement between two districts – the student may remain in the outside district without having to annually re-obtain waiver approval.
Senate floor

AB 2700 – (Ma, D-San Francisco) enables domestic partners who have married each other to dissolve both their marriage and their partnership in a single proceeding.
Senate floor

ACR 74 (Portantino, D-Pasadena) – expresses the Legislature’s desire to find ways to help the state gain a viable public umbilical cord blood banking system to ensure that all races and ethnicities have an equal probability of finding a match when medically necessary. 
Senate floor

AJR 15 (DeLeon, D-Los Angeles) – encourages the federal government to pass legislation to treat same-sex couples by the same immigration standards as married couples.
Chaptered

AJR 19 (Brownley, D-Woodland Hills) – urges Congress and the President to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). 
Passed Senate Judiciary Committee 3-2
Senate floor

AJR 29 (Feuer, D-West Hollywood) – urges the Internal Revenue Service to regard married same-sex couples as married under federal tax laws.
Assembly floor (concurrence)