Things That Are: Bills Passed by California Governor Gavin Newsom
The complete list of bills passed and vetoed by the governor’s office in California has been released, and I have some thoughts. I’d like to preface this by saying I am a detail oriented person, so at the risk of this becoming too lengthy, I’ll be presenting this in a two part examination, beginning with the bills that passed. The overall trend in the governor’s legislation decisions this election cycle has been a fairly strong statement supporting the preservation of democracy, civil rights, and freedom of speech. The presentation of his stance this year came through in signing and vetoing bills on all issues, running the gamut from inmate issues to AI use. AI has held salience with all corners of the political spectrum, and prisons, for those who don’t know, are a particularly divisive issue for California voters.
I want to start with the most important bill for California voters to know about as we get closer to the end of October. SB 1174 has banned local governments from requiring you to have an ID on you when you go to vote. According to what I have read, this bill is actually the latest escalation in a lawsuit brought by the California Attorney General and Secretary of State against Huntington Beach after the city enacted a voter ID policy to combat voter fraud, which has held fast in the headlines for 8 years now, despite limited evidence (in my opinion), that it happens at any significant level. But hey, it’s still good news. Go vote, and if you leave your wallet or your passport at home, you won’t be turned away.
The rest of the bills I was interested in are what I like to call “secret third thing” bills. The issues on the table for California are fentanyl, crime, and homelessness. That will all be in the news ad nauseum. I am interested in the other issues, the bills that will make a difference in areas we don’t think about daily as a “top ten problem”. One of these, for example, deals with inmates’ rights. I was particularly impressed with AB 1810, an assembly bill passed by the governor requiring freely available menstrual products in our state prisons. Checking articles about this particular bill, I have seen that the wording of “Freely available” means that inmates don’t even have to ask for them.
I’ll be honest right now and tell you that my knowledge of prison healthcare, particularly for women, is limited to op-eds and television, but the overwhelming impression I get is bad. Hopefully this will improve life for inmates in need of such products, and supporters of the bill say that the system in place for getting these items increases the already vast power imbalance between inmates in need and the guards.
Healthcare was generally a big issue area for this legislation cycle, because SB 1300 and AB 1895 were also passed. This bill package requires public notification in advance of a hospital labor and delivery or psychiatric ward closing its doors. The hospital moving forward with the closure is additionally required to hold a public hearing with the board of supervisors in the county the hospital serves, and explain why the closure is happening. The assembly bill in particular requires that hospital reports struggles in keeping the services available to regulating agencies so that those agencies may play a bigger role in assessing damages to patient care. This is no doubt in response to the spike in maternity ward closures in the state, and the growing concerns in the wake of the state’s fentanyl and homelessness crisis regarding access to comprehensive psychiatric care. I am personally relieved that psychiatric care is receiving strong support in the legislature, and in that regard, I have saved the best (in this topic) for last.
Giving her voice to the politics surrounding underage psychiatric patients, we have none other than Paris Hilton, giving voice to the trauma caused by for-profit residential treatment facilities for minors. She shared her own horrific experience, but noted that the groups most impacted by these facilities are foster youth, adopted youth, kids whose parents have passed away or children of parents who did not have the community or financial resources to provide proper support. She previously testified before the U.S. House Ways and Means committee, emphasizing the cost of keeping a child in one of these types of facilities. In California, SB 1043 received bipartisan support to provide more transparency regarding how the children in these facilities are treated. The bill specifically targets the lack of reporting to social services on restraining children or placing them in solitary, two experiences Hilton said she herself lived through while being treated. This bill will hopefully increase oversight, and parental input, as Hilton claims her parents were lied to by the facility where she was in residence. Hilton’s nonprofit, 11:11 Media Impact, is a co-sponsor of this state bill, and I hope that legislators on a federal level take note. Newsom’s signing of the bill came with support of Hilton’s efforts, as his statement includes, “I am proud to sign legislation today to help protect our youth against such harmful tactics, and I’m grateful to Paris Hilton for using her voice to ensure that no child suffers like she did.” I wholeheartedly agree, and I believe her work on this issue highlights the extreme danger in telling entertainers to, figuratively, “Shut up and sing.”
Another issue that impacts celebrities and also everyone is doxxing. Doxxing is the act of publishing someone’s identification information- private addresses, phone number, personal contact details- with the intent to cause them harm. AB 1979 allows victims of this kind of invasion to sue in civil court for damages up to $30,000. My impression is that this is generally a good thing, but just like any crimes related to the internet, privacy is relative. I have a whole complicated set of beliefs surrounding the ethics of this, which will be a separate piece, but for now I’ll just say that I support this because doxxing is one of those crimes that happens so much more often than it is prosecuted. As we move through the most divisive time in our country, not just politically but regarding identity and personal choice, the time is now to crack down on potential harmful invasions of privacy and sharing people’s home addresses (and potentially deadnames) on the internet.
Speaking of bills designed to curtail those who would use their powers of tech knowledge for evil, three bills have been passed with the express purpose of protecting voters from misinformation caused by AI deepfakes. In case I just started speaking a different language, that basically means that voters are now more vulnerable than ever to artificial intelligence creating intentionally deceptive manipulated audio clips, photos, and videos that would willfully deceive them into making a choice at the ballot box that isn’t right for them and their families. AB 2839 attacks the creators and publishers of willfully deceptive misinformation, AB 2655 requires online platforms (lookin at you, X) to clearly label or wholly take down such materials within 3 days of someone reporting the content, and AB 2355 hits the final nail in the coffin, by requiring political campaigns to publicly disclose AI use in their ads. The timing of this could not be more perfect. Aside from the AI images of Taylor Swift endorsing Trump, which I have already complained about enough for one decade, Elon Musk published materials mimicking Kamala Harris’s voice. The ensuing struggle between Newsom, who said that the material should be illegal, and Musk, who said it was parody (which is a form of protected speech), culminated in this bill package becoming law. Thank goodness. One drawback is that this package really does seem to target only the biggest and baddest of social media and content sharing platforms, and Truth Social just doesn’t have the numbers to be regulated. Sad… or is it?
In further defense of democracy, AB 1784 stops candidates seeking more than one office at a time, and AB 2041 allows for more use of campaign funds for security for the candidate. Under AB 1784, candidates can also withdraw candidacy up until the deadline to file, a choice they could not make until this package passed. I like this bill package. It seems like a no-brainer that you can’t run for more than one thing at once, particularly the power-grabby methods that are all around us, but yay! It’s a law now! You can’t! I’m also fond of the increase in fluidity surrounding funding for security. particularly as riots and violence seem to be in the news daily, and I know that campaigning is a full time job. Asking candidates to fund security for their children out of their own pockets is a steep ask, depending on what kind of background the candidate comes from. Which is the point, really. No matter your economic background, you can run for office and be safe. The language in this bill had to be cleaned up and specifics had to be outlined- Newsom previously vetoed something very similar because it could lead to misuse of campaign donations.
Giving everyone a fair shake when it comes to fulfilling their goals became one of the themes for this cycle. AB 1780, preventing a private nonprofit college applicant’s relation to alumni or major donors from being considered in their acceptance, was also passed. This is incredibly cool. When affirmative action was formally struck down by The Supreme Court, college admission was talked about a lot, although California formally banned it many years ago (1998, I believe?). Possibly because of my close friendship with the hardest working student on campus, someone who’s family came to the US from Ukraine, I became aware of the face we put on the words “first generation” and “immigrant student.” The picture we paint doesn’t cover nearly everyone it applies to. This bill, in doing away with yet another barrier, is an unequivocally positive step. By beginning to chip away at advantages related to wealth, in addition to race, we bring our country many steps closer to that shining goal-education, for everyone.
Just when I think I am running out of segues, speaking of education, we cannot learn from our comfort zone. Education is like healing- it happens overtime. And sometimes you’re in a cast, and it itches. AB 1825 takes aim at the increase in the desire to see schools become a place where feelings are bubble wrapped and the comfort zone of bias and misinformation is a protected innocence, rather than a barrier ready to be shattered by a competent educator. The bill moves forward with rebelling against the book banning feature of this mindset, mandating that public libraries create and maintain a policy surrounding the process of choosing books. Specifically, banning books containing issues of race and sexuality is forbidden. The law allows for librarians liberty to choose where to display books with heavy sexual content, and it calls for creating a way for communities that go to the library to voice their opinions on the displayed material. The thing that I really like about this, is that it proves that California’s legislature is, in some ways, highly effectual. As arguably the most notoriously blue state in the union, the problems we face are not as dramatic as the federal level. We don’t have reproductive care worries on a state level, we don’t have to deal with too much police violence (again, relative to other states), and we don’t have lasting and evolving over which of our citizens can be counted as people. Book banning and attacks on education are two of the only things that we deal with at the level that such issues are displayed on national news, and when the chance arose to nip those oppressive practices in the bud, California legislators got it done.
When it comes to banned books, and having access to reading whatever the hell you want (where my fae smut queens at?), an issue that plagues democracy constantly is freedom of choice. Not just who you love, what you read, what news you get, but in how you party. SB 969 was passed, protecting this right, as it allows for bars and restaurants to sell alcohol that people can drink publicly, off the property of the establishment selling the drinks. Additionally, AB1775 made cannabis cafes legal, a bill that comes from the success of a program that experimented with this in the city of San Francisco. According to the article I got most of my bill tracking superpowers from (I was not, in fact, born this way,) establishments like this already exist in the state, but they can only sell prepackaged items. I gave this bill a very snappy intro, perhaps to hide my initial trepidation. If the law is changing so that prepackaged cannabis goods are no longer the legal requirement, how far does this go? I always struggle between not wanting to be a Karen, and wanting to remind people that maybe it's not a good idea for people to be smoking weed and legally publically drinking within a certain radius of a popular family shopping center or a school. I say this, of course, not knowing which cities will choose to act upon it, and how- all this means is that it is legal, if they so choose.
Other bills that got passed that I won’t go into accomplished things such as removing medical debt from credit reports, giving tenants 10 days instead of the current 5, to respond to an eviction notice, and to make it easier to build tiny homes and streamline the process of creating homeless shelters. All of these things are very important. I also see all of these on the Breaking News front page. This is my view on the bills I didn’t hear much about. Maybe I’m beating a dead horse; if that’s the case, tell me what news you read and I’ll follow suit.
Stay tuned for my analysis on the bills that were vetoed, and please connect with me in the comments or on social media if you disagree with everything I have written. Democracy is a process, and freedom of speech is your right.
For a complete list, and my source on the quotes from the governor, check out this piece.
