Continuation of article on California Legislature: Trends and Bills to Watch This Year 

 

Life & Family - Among the life and family bills that the Legislature will consider are end-of-life decisions, CalWORKs eligibility for pregnant women and newborns, the "contraceptive mandate," and the statutory redefinition of marriage.

  

The Conference will be supporting the CalWORKs bills (AB 1579 and SB 899), which would provide benefits to needy pregnant women and remove the "maximum family grant" provision upon the birth of an additional child. And it will oppose a bill (SB 1053) which inserts the provisions of the Federal Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate into State statute. The measure appears to be "insurance" in case the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the mandate later in the year.

  

A measure that would remove the statutory definition of marriage as between a man and a woman (Prop 22) and the replacement of husband and wife language with the word "spouse" will also be opposed (SB 1306). The Legislature does not have the power to remove the constitutional language defining traditional marriage (Prop 8), but in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last June, it is unenforceable.

  

The CCC may also be opposing the end-of-life bills (AB 2129 and SB 1357) if they become vehicles for Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society) to advance their goal of legalize physician assisted suicide.

  

Education - This session, an unprecedented number of bills use innovative tax measures to improve student education. In total, about 15 different bills use some kind of tax relief, credit or incentive to help California students. The Conference will continue to strongly advocate for equitable access to a high quality education for all California students in public, independent, and faith-based schools and at all levels -- kindergarten to post-secondary.

  

Several bills have been introduced which would create tax relief and/or incentives that empower parents as well as teachers to care for their own school children's learning needs, inspire greater charitable contributions to expand local resources in K-12 education, and encourage greater savings for college (Click here for a summary sheet). 

  

A number of bills also deal with health and safety issues in schools, including childhood immunization (AB 1667 and AB 2546) and injury-prevention measures (AB 2127). Similar to last year, additional pieces of legislation will attempt to increase and/or strengthen mandated training in schools for child abuse reporting (SB 843 and several others).

  

Restorative Justice -- A Federal court panel has given California two more years to fix its long-running prison overcrowding problem. The Brown administration argued that it needed additional time to develop more permanent solutions to reduce its prison population by at least 7,000. State leaders have been trying to find a politically viable solution to the overcrowding since 2011 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that our State's prison conditions amounted to "cruel and unusual punishment."

  

This next two years could mark a time of real reform of parole and sentencing practices or be a step towards the construction of new prison cells. In the meantime, the legislature has introduced a number of bills that are more "restorative" in focus such as protecting victims of crime (AB 1629, AB 1911 and AB 2532) and support for victims of domestic violence (AB 1547 and SB 1208).

 

Economic Justice - Although the social safety net has proven to be a vital tool in the fight against poverty, many Californians are still struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession - the worst economic downturn in generations.

 

The legislature continues to push forward on measures that reduce poverty such as a state Earned Income Tax Credit (SB 1189) and measures that provide the necessary investments in people and the state's future. Over the last five years, the people who needed the most help were the ones who faced the harshest budget cuts. As the economy improves this year, leaders will be trying to "restore" some of those cuts. (AB 264, AB 1574, AB 2115 and others.)

 

Immigration - Immigrant-related bills continue to be introduced at the state level, some of which are aimed at providing work permits to undocumented workers (AB 2014), protecting unlicensed drivers from price-gauging and extortion related to vehicle impoundments (AB 235) and providing non-discriminatory drivers licenses to undocumented residents (AB 1660).

 

Perhaps the two most watched immigrant related bills this session are a bill that would extend the Affordable Care Act to undocumented residents in California (SB 1005) and a bill that would extend public social services for non-citizens in California (AB 2345).

Some of these bills are not yet in final form. If you see a "monitor" position on a bill, for example, it could be because the final language is not yet available or the bill has the potential to be of interest if it is amended in a certain way. Once again, for legislative analyses and schedules for all the bills being tracked by the Conference, visit the Legislative Reports page where you can also view bills by category.