Update: Amended AB 247 Passed Committee and Moves to Floor
Amended AB 247 passed out of committee and will go to a Senate Floor vote on Wednesday. Please contact our Senator, Ben Allen, to urge him to remove the wealth-based sliding scale that harms our district.
Contact Sen. Allen: (310) 414-8190; Senator.Allen@Senate.CA.gov
In the meantime, please take a look at what the Governor and Legislature are doing to the citizen initiative to repeal Prop 47. Prop 47 recategorized some nonviolent felonies as misdemeanors, including grand theft where the value of stolen property does not exceed $950, and is blamed for the massive uptick in property crime throughout California and inability of law enforcement to hold thieves accountable.
According to Congressman Kevin Kiley, who backed the ballot-qualified citizen initiative End Prop 47:
“Each of Newsom's corrupt schemes to subvert the End Prop. 47 initiative has failed. But he just revealed one last Hail Mary that is the most warped plot yet.
The Governor is strong-arming the Supermajority to put a competing Prop. 47 "reform" initiative on the ballot. This is an odd move, for starters, because he's spent all year insisting an initiative isn't necessary or helpful. But since disenfranchising voters is no longer an option, he's now trying to confuse them into picking his version of the initiative – which is of course much weaker than the true End Prop. 47 initiative.
One potential snag with this plan is the deadline to put an initiative on the ballot has passed. A second snag is that putting a measure on the ballot without going through the signature-gathering process requires a 2/3 vote of the Legislature, and he doesn't have the votes for that.
But no matter: to get around both the missed deadline and the 2/3 requirement, Newsom is calling a separate "Special Election" for his initiative, which will just so happen to be set for November 5, 2024 and wrapped into the same ballot as End 47 and everything else. I'm sure he's just trying to save paper.
And while he was changing deadlines, he also had his Secretary of State change last Friday's deadline for numbering the Propositions so that his initiative will get the highest available number ("Prop. 2") and appear before the true End 47 initiative on the ballot.
Even up to this point, you might not see the problem. Won't voters just pass both measures, so we'll have both the strong protections of End 47 and the weak protections of Newsom's initiative? Well, he thought of that too.
In the most shamelessly anti-democratic move yet, the text of Newsom's initiative says that if it passes by a higher margin than End 47, then the entire End 47 initiative is null and void - even where there is no conflict whatsoever between the two initiatives. There is no other way to say it: Newsom has created a mechanism to overturn the result of a democratic election.
And let's not forget his ultimate objective: to allow fentanyl dealers to keep killing people, serial thieves to go unpunished, and drug addicts to go without treatment. To achieve those perverse ends, he is willing to turn the democratic process in California upside-down.”
There were not enough votes in the Assembly today to grant Newsom’s wish, and they will try again Wednesday. Our Assemblyman, Al Muratsuchi, voted in support of Newsom’s scheme. Please contact Mr. Muratsuchi to ask him why he would do such a thing.
As always, this is just one lady’s opinion. I don’t speak for the board, and no one speaks for me.
