Holding all the power in Sacramento with a supermajority, Democrat politicians passed another measure in Thursday’s Senate Session to tip the scale in favor of their fellow lawmaker. This is not their first attempt to protect their supermajority while taking power away from citizen voters.

Citizens in the Twenty-Ninth Senate District have already gathered more than the requisite number of signatures to order a recall election. To game the system and undermine the people’s constitutional recall power, Democrats and their allies have made the following changes to benefit one of their own:

• Fast-tracked Senate Bill 96, a measure to delay signature-gathering and create legislative hurdles (June 2017). However, Third District Court of Appeal Judge Vance W. Raye, citing it violated the state’s single-subject rule for legislation, issued an order to block this law.

• Convinced the Fair Political Practices Commission to eliminate monetary contribution limits for recall elections against the advice of their own attorneys. This decision was the product of secret advocacy of a Democrat lawyer and a former public employee labor union official serving on the commission as reported by media reports (August 2017).

Today, Democrats:

• Made another attempt to undermine the citizen recall authority established in the California Constitution by significantly lengthening the time required to qualify a recall election with procedural roadblocks (Assembly Bill 132/Senate Bill 117 – budget trailer bill). 

Under current law, California’s Secretary of State can begin the process of certifying the signatures submitted to authorize to call for a recall election immediately upon submission.

BACKGROUND: Following the vote to raise the largest car and gas tax in California’s history (Senate Bill 1), citizens within the Twenty-Ninth Senate District launched a recall against their Senator.          

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