News Clips

Raise your hand if you think money plays too big a role in politics. We may be naive, but we wouldn’t be surprised if a few officeholders out there are holding their hands in the air, because they’d like to spend less time with their palms out. It’s expensive to communicate with voters. Mail and advertising cost a lot of money, and legislative candidates can burn a lot of fuel getting around geographically large districts.

Faced with opposition from the California Democratic Party and open-government advocates, divided state lawmakers advanced a bill Tuesday that would increase the amount of campaign money that can be accepted by Democratic and Republican legislative leaders. The proposal approved Tuesday by a 3-2 vote of the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee would allow partisan caucuses in the Legislature to accept campaign contributions of $36,000 from individual sources for state races, up from the current limit of $4,400. The bill would also allow the caucus committees to make unlimited contributions to state candidates and accept unlimited funds for independent expenditures not coordinated with favored candidates. “AB 84 would be the biggest rollback of California’s campaign finance law in at least a decade,” Nicolas Heidorn of California Common Cause told the panel.

California lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a bill to let legislative leaders raise and spend more money to help their preferred candidates, despite opposition from open-government groups. The bill would let leaders in the Legislature operate fundraising committees governed like political party committees at the state and county level. Such committees have higher contribution limits than regular campaigns and can give unlimited amounts to help their chosen state candidates.

Dan Vicuna, Common Cause's National Redistricting Manager, and Sylvia Moore, Southern California Organizer for California Common Cause appeared at Equitable Redistricting for Cambodians community forum on redistricting reform in Long Beach at the MAYE Center, Aug. 4, 2018. The Long Beach City Council is poised to ask voters to end political gerrymandering in its city by placing the proposal on the November ballot.

In 2014, the California Legislature made a big deal of calling for a constitutional convention to overturn the Citizens United ruling, which allows unlimited corporate and union spending in campaigns. Now, in 2018, some legislators are pushing a bill that critics say will open the floodgates to special interest money in legislative races, as soon as the November election. It’s not only hypocritical, it’s a bad idea. Assembly Bill 84 should get a quick death before the Senate Elections Committee on Tuesday.

A joint effort between California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and the Department of Motor Vehicles managed to get 250,000 new registered voters on the rolls between April and June, according to the government watchdog group Common Cause.