California’s literary and cinema culture loves suspense — a Raymond Chandler novel, a Hollywood film noir.
But our political culture in Sacramento loves suspense, too, and, unlike a good mystery story, the politicians’ love of making their work mysterious does not serve the people of California, and their desire to have government work be out in the open, well.
When our elected leaders in the state Legislature want to get rid of proposed legislation — or otherwise simply hide it away — without voting up or down on it in public, they move it into what they term the “suspense file,” which is “a secretive process that will decide whether the measures live or die,” as the nonprofit news site CalMatters puts it.
The Assembly and the state Senate moved more than 100 proposed bills into the suspense file just last week.
“In just 24 minutes and without any debate, the most powerful committee in the state Senate last week moved 33 bills from public view into a secretive process that will decide whether the measures live or die. Two days later, its sister committee in the Assembly moved 82 of its bills in under two minutes to the same secretive, uncertain future,” CalMatters reports.
Links to the verbatim transcripts of the Assembly and Senate’s separate appropriation committees action are available at the CalMatters website, and a colder, more bloodless politics is hard to imagine.
Something on the order of a quarter to a third of the bills are likely to be killed entirely without a public vote in May. “For most of the bills, no one but lobbyists, a handful of capital staffers, lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policy team will know exactly why,” per CalMatters.
It’s a way of doing the people’s business without having to tell the people about it. Of the over 2,400 bills that just disappeared — “died,” in the parlance of Sacramento — during the last two-year legislative cycle, only 25 of them were killed when a majority of legislative lawmakers publicly voted “no” on them.
Not all of the bills tossed into the secrecy of the suspense file deal with the most important issues in the world. AB 800, authored by Assemblywoman Liz Ortega, D-Hayward, would force the Department of Corrections “to require all food items sold in prison vending machines to be priced at the same average market retail price as in the community in which the prison is located.”
That seems, on its surface, a reasonable mandate. Or, perhaps it’s not. Perhaps jailbirds’ Snickers should cost more than the ones those of us not in the Big House buy in our own office vending machines, as extra punishment for their crimes. Or perhaps they should cost less, because prisoners are by definition cash-poor. Whichever it is, we’ll never know what our elected reps think, because they’ll never have to vote on the bill in public.
Assemblymember Corey Jackson, D-Moreno Valley, has criticized his supermajority party’s leadership for its use of the suspense file. “The way we treat the appropriations process is a non-democratic process; I believe that it’s a corrupt process,” Jackson said.
And Senate Republicans last summer were angered when the Appropriations Committee wouldn’t vote in public on their bill that sought to add new requirements before state officials could place “sexually violent predators” in communities. Sen. Brian Jones, R-San Diego, said Democratic leaders were protecting “predators over families.”
Some of this is political inside baseball, with nothing more at stake than squabbles between individual legislators. But California politicians do themselves, or the esteem in which we hold them, no favors by operating in the dark.
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