Tomorrow is the deadline for members of the California legislature to introduce legislation that can be considered in this session. So let’s take an early peek at what our people are up to, shall we?
Sen. Noreen Evans has a pretty full plate going into tomorrow’s deadline — six bills introduced as of this moment, some of them real barnburners.
Senate Bill 121, which Evans introduced last month, is a fairly bold attack on corporate campaign financing and the Citizens United decision. It would require corporations to tally up and publish all their campaign donations yearly, and also to notify shareholders of any pending donations 24 hours before they are made. Evans took a run at a similar bill — SB 982 — last year; it died in committee after she canceled a hearing for reasons obscure.
Then you’ve got Senate Bill 241, a strike at the California oil industry. The bill would levy a 9.9 percent “severance fee” on every barrel of oil extracted from state lands or waters, with proceeds going to higher education and the California parks system. Last week the Press Democrat had some coverage of the bill, including a rundown of previous failed attempts and a brush-off from oil execs.
Senate Bill 59 attempts to close a truly bizarre loophole in the law that lets men sexually assault or rape unmarried women do so with impunity, so long as they accomplish their vile acts through impersonation of that woman’s significant other. The legislation follows from a repugnant case out of Los Angeles, in which the state’s 2nd District Court of Appeals was forced to overturn a man’s rape conviction because of the loophole. An LA Times report on the case notes that the court begged the legislature to fix the law, even as it set the man free.
Other bills include an extension of the commercial salmon stamp and a new system for tribal courts to recover civil judgments against non-tribal citizens. Finally, and perhaps closest to home, the senator proposes limiting state bar membership fees to their current levels; out-of-pocket expenditures are presumably ever a concern for the put-upon Evans, who has long protested the difficulty, for a working woman, of getting by on a mere $100,000 a year.