Ballots can determine whether you’re safe walking the streets and how much of your paycheck is taken by the government. Ballots can even determine whether children will be taken from their parents, and parents from their children, in a military draft.

Given the stakes, ballots should be carefully watched.

On Wednesday, Connecticut Superior Court Judge William F. Clark cited evidence of mail ballot fraud to overturn the recent Democratic primary election for mayor of Bridgeport, the state’s largest city. The evidence included hundreds of hours of video surveillance. “The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all of the parties,” he said.

Maybe not so shocking. A city employee affiliated with the incumbent mayor’s campaign was recorded apparently stuffing ballot boxes to help the mayor to a come-from-behind win, and just weeks earlier, Connecticut’s State Elections Enforcement Commission had recommended criminal charges for the same city employee in connection with the handling of absentee ballots in the 2019 mayoral primary, which of course was won by the now-incumbent mayor.

What’s shocking, at least to some of us in California, is that there was an investigation at all.

That’s not the way we do it here.

In California, we have barreled through changes to voting equipment and procedures, adopting electronic voting technology, automatic voter registration, mail ballots sent to all voters, unattended ballot drop boxes, ballot harvesting and a requirement for counties to accept mail ballots up to seven days after the polls close, even without a postmark.

In February 2020, voters were assured by then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla that electronic voting technology would still include a paper ballot for verification, but things turned a little sketchy when voters asked to see those ballots.

In March 2020, a Long Beach group sought a recount of a city tax increase measure that had squeaked to a suspiciously late-breaking 16-vote victory. Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan informed the group that it would have to pay more than $100,000 just to have county workers retrieve the paper ballots, and then pay for the recount. Even a full recount of the ballot scans would potentially cost about $200,000 because of the need for tech workers and electronic viewing stations.

After a partial recount of the scans found numerous “variances,” meaning the machine read the ballots incorrectly, the Long Beach group asked the county for a cost adjustment to complete the recount, but Logan refused. And when the group sued over the prohibitive costs, Logan responded that it’s not his problem if changes to the law and technology made recounts unaffordable. L.A. Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff agreed with Logan.

When Los Angeles County residents who were outraged over violent crime in their communities collected more than 715,000 signatures to force an election to recall District Attorney George Gascón, Logan’s office rejected nearly 200,000 signatures, enough to declare that the recall effort had failed.

It’s the law in California that proponents of a failed initiative, referendum or recall petition have the right to see all the rejected signatures and the reason for the rejection. Voters might reasonably expect election officials to carry out this responsibility promptly.

But in L.A. County, Logan’s office sharply limited the time and facilities available for viewing the rejected signatures. The recall proponents had to go to court for relief, and Logan was ordered to provide more access.

The recall proponents went back to court after they accumulated evidence that Logan’s office had improperly rejected tens of thousands of valid voter signatures. They also demonstrated, through a public records request, that Logan had overstated the number of registered voters in L.A. County by hundreds of thousands in a report to the Secretary of State. Because the signature threshold to qualify a county recall is 10% of the number of registered voters, the threshold for qualification was set improperly high. Given the new numbers, it appears likely that the recall proponents actually did collect enough valid signatures to put the Gascón recall before the voters.

But instead of announcing an internal investigation or review, Logan fought the lawsuit, just as he did when the Long Beach Reform Coalition sought a reasonable cost for a recount. Using your tax dollars to pay for lawyers, Logan was able to stall and delay, running up withering legal bills for the voters who were exercising their rights under the law.

However, last week there was a significant development in Case Number 23STCP02365, Committee to Support the Recall of District Attorney George Gascón v. Logan.

L.A. Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff, the same judge who ruled for Logan in the Long Beach case, denied Logan’s motion to strike any challenge to the accuracy of the voter rolls. Instead, Beckloff invited recall proponents to amend their petition to the court, writing that the allegations related to the voter rolls “are not ‘irrelevant, false or improper’ and therefore cannot be struck.”

The case is proceeding to trial, probably in March. Gascón potentially could face a recall election before his term is up.

And, if the recall proponents can sustain their funding for the lawsuit through all the stalling, attorneys will be able to conduct discovery, extracting documents and testimony from Dean Logan’s office. Perhaps they can do what the Board of Supervisors and Secretary of State Shirley Weber refuse to do — end Logan’s arrogant practice of battling to prevent voters from simply checking the accuracy of election results, signature verification and voter registration records.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_shelley

Who?

The answer to that question depends on your preferred news sources. For example, CBS Evening News on Thursday presented Johnson as an election-denying, anti-gay bigot who opposes abortion rights.

Conservative news sources, on the other hand, reported that Johnson made a commitment to establish a fiscal commission to fight inflation by reducing excess government spending, and that he raised the issue of the “catastrophe” on the southern border and called on the White House and the Senate to stop ignoring the crisis.

The 2024 elections are well underway. If you’re a voter who will be motivated to go to the polls to protect abortion rights, you’ll be getting mail, phone calls and text messages slamming Republicans. On the other hand, if you’re a voter who’s worried about inflation and the fact that in just a couple of years roughly 7 million people have walked into the country across an effectively open border, your inboxes will be overflowing with messages slamming Democrats.

Other news coverage focused on the role former president Donald Trump played in the unfolding saga. Answering questions from reporters in the hallway outside the New York courtroom where he’s on trial in one of the many cases in which he has been charged since announcing his candidacy for president, Trump weighed in on developments and dropped hints about his preferences as the speaker’s race serpentined to its surprising conclusion.

Trump’s handprints were on the race most visibly after House Majority Whip Tom Emmer won a vote in the caucus to be Republican party’s nominee for speaker. The former president posted a statement on Truth Social calling Emmer a “Globalist RINO” who is “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and declaring that Republican House members would be making a “tragic mistake” by electing Emmer as speaker. Then, according to reporting by Politico, Trump worked the phones and solidified opposition to Emmer, who dropped out of the speaker’s race just four hours after he won the nomination.

That cleared the way for Rep. Mike Johnson to secure the nomination, after which he won a majority vote on the floor of the House with solid Republican support.

Everyone seems to agree that Mike Johnson is very conservative, but not everyone agrees on the meaning of that term. What does it mean to the newly elected Speaker of the House?

In 2018, Johnson drafted a list of what he called “7 Core Principles of Conservatism.” At the very top is “individual freedom,” followed by “limited government,” “the rule of law,” “peace through strength,” “fiscal responsibility,” “free markets” and “human dignity.”

Where does Johnson stand on the issues? The global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP, published a guide to the new speaker’s policy positions. A few highlights:

“Speaker Johnson is an outspoken supporter of Israel and said the House must ‘take all necessary actions to end Hamas forever.’”

“Speaker Johnson supports increasing domestic production of oil and gas to increase America’s energy independence and create jobs.”

“Speaker Johnson supported a variety of legislation that would strengthen U.S. border security and reform asylum policies.”

“Speaker Johnson voted against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.”

“Speaker Johnson is a supporter of the impeachment inquiry into President Biden.”

Speaker Johnson “has also called for oversight of the aid that the United States is sending to Ukraine, saying that ‘we should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos, American mothers are struggling to find baby formula, gas prices are at record highs, and American families are struggling to make ends meet, without sufficient oversight over where the money will go.’”

And, “Speaker Johnson historically has been against tax increases.”

Johnson’s speakership could be short-lived. Republicans have only a bare majority in the House and Democrats already are trying to portray the new speaker, and all Republican candidates, as unacceptable extremists, especially on the issue of abortion. However, voters are also concerned about the need to secure the border and get control of inflation. Republicans may have the edge there.

Leading into the election year is the threat of a government shutdown amidst a fight over federal spending. Just before the lights went out on former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he negotiated a continuing resolution (CR) that expires on November 18. Congress will have to pass a new CR, or a spending plan, to keep the government open.

There’s a division in the Republican Party between those who want transparent, individual spending bills and those who would rather have last-minute omnibus bills that cover everything but are too long to read before they’re voted on. An omnibus on Christmas Eve is a fine place to hide ridiculous government spending. Some Republicans are sick of that.

Democrats have pointed and laughed at what they called “chaos” in the House Republican caucus. It’s true that Democrats are very unified. The problem is that they’re unified in their desire to spend the money you haven’t even earned yet and then hand the bill to your kids.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Freedom of speech, the most fundamental of freedoms, has a very simple meaning. It means the government may not infringe your freedom to speak, to express your views and ideas, and to be heard in public.

Laws prohibiting specific types of speech such as libel and incitement to violence must be narrowly tailored. A broad, government-directed censorship of speech to prevent unspecified potential harm is what the First Amendment makes impossible. If it doesn’t, it might as well be in a landfill.

Garbage trucks are standing by. A majority of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have just granted the government’s request to “stay” (undo) a lower court’s order requiring the government to immediately stop the conduct which prompted the lawsuit previously called Missouri v. Biden and now known as Murthy v. Missouri.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, disagreed with the majority’s decision. They do not think the court should have allowed the government to continue “what two lower courts found to be a ‘coordinated campaign’ by high-level federal officials to suppress the expression of disfavored views on important public issues.”

The Supreme Court majority did this “without undertaking a full review of the record and without any explanation,” Alito wrote.

That record includes 82 pages of “findings of fact” by the U.S. District Court. The injunction ordered by Judge Terry Doughty found that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail and that they would suffer irreparable harm if the government was allowed to continue what the Court of Appeals agreed was “unrelenting pressure” from certain government officials that likely “had the intended result of suppressing mil­lions of protected free speech postings by American citi­zens.”

While the injunction allowed the government to take actions in narrow categories of national security and criminal investigation, it prohibited the White House and multiple government departments and agencies from “any manner” of “urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing” social media companies to engage in the “removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The judge said that means no flagging, no forwarding, and no pressuring the companies to “change their guidelines.” Further, no meetings, calls, letters, or texts, and no “following up” or “requesting content reports” to document “actions taken to remove, delete, suppress or reduce content containing protected free speech.”

If that sounds like it couldn’t possibly be real in the United States of America and must be some fevered nightmare of paranoid “extremists on the right,” consider this: the Biden administration immediately appealed the injunction, insisting that it must continue all these practices for the good of the nation while the case proceeds to trial.

It is this appeal of the district court’s order that ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court and has now found favor with a majority of justices on the nation’s highest court. This is the branch of the United States government that is ultimately responsible for safeguarding your freedom by telling the rest of the government that the Constitution means there are some things the government simply cannot do to people.

For now, the U.S. Supreme Court will allow the government to continue its coercive censorship-by-proxy. However, the justices agreed to consider the merits of the case and issue a decision, likely by next June.

If the justices rule for the government and against the people who were censored and deplatformed, the loss of freedom of speech will only accelerate in years to come. Governments don’t ever give up their coercive powers voluntarily.

Be alarmed that a majority of the justices presently on the court thought it was okay for these coercive activities to continue, even temporarily. Pray for the health of the ones who didn’t.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @ Susan_Shelley

Today, he might write it differently.

“Well, if you ever plan to motor west, take the highway to the driveway of the bank.”

Here’s what it would cost you for regular-grade gas if you made that “Route 66” trip today from Chicago to St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, and San Bernardino:

The average price of regular-grade gas in Illinois on Tuesday was $3.61.

In Missouri, $3.27.

In Oklahoma, $3.19

In Texas, $3.01

In New Mexico, $3.51

In Arizona, $4.28

In California, $5.57

Of course, these are averages, and your neighborhood may vary. On Sunday in the San Fernando Valley, 16.7 gallons of regular gas cost me $103.60. I’ll do the math for you: $6.20 per gallon.

The cost of crude oil is the biggest driver of gasoline prices, but that doesn’t explain the cost differential as you go over state borders. Policy choices are the difference.

In California, a long list of policy choices are contributing to the high price of gasoline.

Even the worldwide price of crude oil is affected by California policy choices. The decisions to cut back oil production and import oil from other countries have an effect on supply and demand. In 1986, California production peaked at 402.23 million barrels of oil. That was 59.4% of all the oil that went to California refineries. That same year, foreign imports of oil to California totaled only 36.87 million barrels, just 5.5% of the oil refined in California. (The rest came from Alaska.)

Last year, after decades of grinding the domestic oil and gas industry with restrictions and lectures, oil production in California was down to 136 million barrels, or 25.8% of the oil refined in the state. Another 80.25 million barrels came from Alaska, and 311.53 million barrels were imported from countries including Saudi Arabia and Iraq. That’s 59% of the oil refined in California coming into the state from foreign sources instead of local production.

Even as recently as 2017, California’s local production provided 31.3% of the oil that went to California refineries. But there’s no sign that anyone in Sacramento would like to reverse the downward trend, so you can expect the grinding, the restrictions and the hypocritical lectures to continue.

Other policy choices contribute to the high price of gasoline in California, like the 58 cents per gallon in state taxes, on top of federal taxes. The most recent legislation raising gas taxes in the state also included an annual inflation adjustment, so when prices go up and inflation goes up, drivers get slammed twice.

California also requires refineries to buy permits for emitting greenhouse gases, part of a program run by the California Air Resources Board. This regulatory scheme adds varying amounts to the price of all energy in the state, and the money that’s paid for the permits goes into a fund in the state Treasury, just like a tax. Lawmakers decide how they’re going to spend the money, just like a tax. But the courts have said it’s not a tax.

That worked out well for the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The ballot measure that authorized the initial debt financing for the project prohibited any tax increase or public subsidy, but the boondoggle caught a break with the court ruling, because it meant the money you’re paying in the price of gasoline and diesel for these permits could be used to build the bullet train.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. Twenty-five percent of the revenue that goes into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is routed to the High-Speed Rail Authority to pay the high salaries of its executives, the paintings and animations used to show you how great it’s going to be, and the cost of constructing the infrastructure on the route that is definitely not San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Other factors, like smog-reduction regulations, also contribute to the cost.

It’s enough to make anyone who wants to motor west decide to make a U-turn.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

He chose Philadelphia as the site of the announcement and framed his candidacy as “a new Declaration of Independence” for “all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful.”

In a speech you can watch for yourself at the candidate’s website, Kennedy24.com, Kennedy said, “Americans are angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor.”

Back in 2016, the “rigged system” argument for change was made with equal force by Sen. Bernie Sanders and by then-businessman Donald Trump. Supporters packed arenas to hear their speeches, while other candidates struggled to fill five rows of folding chairs. In 2024, will the “rigged system” argument resonate even more?

Kennedy said he intends to become the first independent, non-party candidate elected president since George Washington.

That seems unlikely, but a lot of unlikely things have been happening. So, how likely is it?

A recently released Reuters/Ipsos online poll of 1,005 people found that Kennedy “could draw the support of about one in seven U.S. voters.” The poll found that without Kennedy on the ballot, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump would each draw the support of 35% of voters, give or take 4 points. About 11% of respondents said they’d vote for somebody else, 9% said they didn’t know who they would vote for, and 9% said they would not vote.

In a three-way race with Kennedy on the ballot, pollsters found that RFK, Jr., would draw 14% of the vote, knocking Biden down to 31% and Trump down to 33%. Once again, 9% said they wouldn’t vote at all, and another 13% said they were undecided.

However, it’s important to remember that the national popular vote is irrelevant. Presidents are elected by electoral votes, which are determined by the election results in each state. How Kennedy’s presence on the ballot changes the vote totals in a few key states could affect the outcome of the election even if he doesn’t win a single electoral vote.

That means the major parties can be expected to take the gloves off and fight bare-knuckled to keep Kennedy off the ballot, or, failing that, to discredit him with whatever negative information they can find or invent.

As both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump said in the 2016 campaign, a rigged system is hard to beat.

Start with ballot access. The Democratic and Republican parties will have their candidate on the general election ballot in all 50 states but that’s not automatic for an independent. Each state has its own rules and deadlines. In some states, it may be necessary to get tens of thousands of signatures on a petition, and there’s not much time to organize that effort.

Another problem for independent candidates is the nasty slant of campaign finance laws. Political parties have a special legal status that allows them to solicit and accept larger contributions than candidates themselves may accept, and the law enables county, state and national political parties to move money around in creative and soapy ways. A candidate without a party is at a financial disadvantage in fundraising.

There is at least one super-PAC raising money to support Kennedy’s campaign. American Values 2024 said it had already raised $17 million before Monday’s announcement and then hauled in $11 million more afterwards. But when you have to buy TV commercials in multiple states for months, it goes fast.

Then there’s the challenge of getting on the stage for the presidential debates. Third parties and independents are not automatically included. In fact, they have been very deliberately excluded. The last independent candidate to appear on the presidential debate stage was Ross Perot in 1992. The Commission on Presidential Debates, dominated by Republicans and Democrats, has protectively fiddled with the criteria for inclusion ever since, even surviving a lawsuit by a nonprofit group called Level the Playing Field, which was joined by the Libertarian and Green parties.

Despite all these challenges, Kennedy has significant, highly unusual advantages that make the race unpredictable.

Start with name recognition. For millions of busy voters who don’t spend their time reading about politics or candidates, the sight of a familiar name on the ballot is welcome and reassuring. How many voters, Democrats in particular, will see Robert F. Kennedy’s name on the ballot and feel that the brand is a good one?

He is certainly not a space cadet. The candidate is highly intelligent, very knowledgeable and has a surprising sense of humor. He’s making a perfectly reasonable case for the need to clean up corruption in government and corporate capture of federal agencies. He also wants to end “forever wars,” the surveillance state, and the unconstitutional censorship of Americans that has been directed by our government with our tax dollars. Kennedy rightly points out that the Democratic party, which was once against all those things, is now in favor of them.

“Who is liberal now, and who is conservative? Who is left and who is right?” he asked. “These labels make less and less sense. Yet out of habit, we group ourselves around the empty husks of old alignments and threadbare ideologies.”

But not all the husks are empty. Some of them are full of campaign cash and rigging diagrams.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

It happened within hours of the vote to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. After all Democrats joined eight Republicans in voting McCarthy out, interim speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-North Carolina, declared the House to be in recess, angrily slamming the gavel with such force that if he had been at a carnival he would have won a giant stuffed panda.

According to reporting by Politico, McHenry informed Pelosi’s office via email that she had to have all her belongings moved out of her office by the next day. The email said the “room will be re-keyed” and reassigned.

The New York Post reported that Hoyer was also told on Tuesday that he had to vacate his Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday.

It’s not uncommon for party leaders to use the loss of preferred office space as a tool of party discipline, but it’s usually in their own parties.

Nancy Pelosi was not in the Capitol for the vote to remove McCarthy because she was in California for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s funeral. She complained in a statement that McHenry’s order was a “sharp departure from tradition.”

The timing would seem to indicate that Republican party leadership expected something of former speaker Pelosi, and rage was the reaction when it wasn’t delivered.

McCarthy himself seemed to confirm this in a post-removal press conference. He mused about his life, starting with his childhood in Bakersfield, and he related a story about something that happened in 2022, after Republicans had won the majority but before he had become speaker.

“Nancy Pelosi came to me, she was speaker at the time on the way out, and I told her I was having issues with getting enough votes. She said, ‘What’s the problem?’ I said they want this ‘one person can rule you out,’” McCarthy said. “And she said, ‘Just give it to them. I’ll always back you up. I made the same offer to Boehner, and the same thing to Paul, because I believe in the institution.’”

McCarthy concluded, “I think today was a political decision by the Democrats.”

It sounds as if he thought they had a deal — Pelosi would deliver the votes of enough Democrats to defeat the motion to remove McCarthy.

But then nobody on the Democratic side lifted a finger to save him.

Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Montana, one of the Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy as speaker, described another reason that McCarthy may have thought he had an understanding with Democrats.

Speaking to Jan Jekielek on the American Thought Leaders interview program, Rosendale explained that the agreement McCarthy made in order to become speaker required single-subject bills to fund the government, as required by the Budget Act of 1974, instead of “continuing resolutions” and “omnibus” bills that are thousands of pages long and stuffed with earmarks for pet projects.

Rosendale said McCarthy broke his word on that and instead “completely orchestrated” a delay in bringing appropriations bills to the floor for a vote so that the House would be up against the September 30 end-of-the-fiscal-year deadline. Then, with everyone talking about the shutdown of government, McCarthy negotiated a continuing resolution that “extended Nancy Pelosi spending levels and Joe Biden’s policies.”

That continuing resolution, Rosendale said, “was passed with 209 Democrat votes and only 125 Republican votes.” He said McCarthy was allowing the Democrat minority to “dictate the policies leaving the House. And that’s what we witnessed. When you see more Democrats voting for these major spending measures than Republicans, clearly that wasn’t a compromise, that was selling out the Republican party.”

And there was more. “On top of that, we heard that he negotiated a separate deal with the president to tie border security funding to Ukraine funding,” Rosendale said, “and that was it.”

The fight over the budget process may seem arcane but it affects all of us. We’re experiencing high inflation as a result of the U.S. government printing money to the tune of about $2 trillion per year to cover federal overspending. The national debt is now up to $33 trillion. Interest rates are rising, which could cause a real estate crash and a severe recession. Fiscal insanity in Washington hurts regular people. It’s not unreasonable for lawmakers to go to war for a transparent, responsible budget process. The regularly scheduled cliff-hangers of debt ceilings and shutdowns have led to massive deficit spending and wrecked the value of your currency.

The battle over the budget process is a serious debate, or should be. Unfortunately, legitimate concerns are being drowned out in name-calling.

But at least there’s this: the lawmakers who want to vote for unlimited spending for Ukraine and those who want to vote on transparent budget bills do agree on one thing. Some wars just have to be fought.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who appointed California’s secretary of state, attorney general and United States senator due to vacancies following job-hopping, has just appointed his second United States senator following the passing of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Newly powerful Senator Laphonza Butler has been a lobbyist/advisor, a labor leader, a fundraiser and a partner in a campaign strategy firm with ties to Newsom. Talk about cutting out the middleman. This woman can finance an entire presidential campaign while riding alone in an elevator.

Of course, I say she’s a woman, but I’m not a biologist. The governor’s office announced in an online post that Butler is the “leader of the nation’s largest organization dedicated to electing women,” although they may not know what a woman is, either, because EMILY’s List defines women as Democrats who support abortion rights, so now we all have to go back to biology class and figure this out.

The governor’s office also said Butler “will make history as the first Black lesbian to openly serve in Congress.”

That makes Newsom the first governor to “out” whoever was the first Black lesbian to not-openly serve in Congress. And he’s also the first governor to appoint a Maryland resident to be the United States senator from California.

So much leadership!

After reporters noticed that Butler lives in Maryland and might be ineligible for a job that constitutionally requires residency in the state of California, Newsom’s office said Butler owns a home in California and only moved to the D.C. area for the job with EMILY’s List.

A source provided me with the property records showing that Butler’s 5-bedroom home is in the View Park area of Los Angeles, near USC. It was offered for rent — the old listing can still be seen on websites such as Apartments.com, along with a notation that it’s not currently available. An internet search of the address seems to indicate that somebody else is living there now.

KTLA reported that the L.A. County Registrar confirmed that Butler became a registered voter in Los Angeles County on Sunday using the online registration system. But at what home address? Although voter registration is on the “honor system,” the forms are signed under penalty of perjury. If the new U.S. senator registered to vote using the address of a home that’s rented to somebody else, she’s fortunate that in California, Our Democracy is protected by mail ballots going to somebody else’s mailbox.

Some Democrats in California may feel that Their Democracy has been threatened by Feinstein’s untimely departure. She left us before the close of the filing period for 2024. Now candidates in California have until December 8 to recalibrate their plans in light of a crucial new factor.

Sen. Laphonza Butler is very likely to run for re-election.

Newsom famously promised to appoint a Black woman to the Senate in the event that Feinstein couldn’t finish her term, but more recently he declared that he wanted to be fair to the candidates who have been running campaigns to win the seat in an election. So he said his appointee would serve only as a caretaker to finish out the term and then, presumably, gracefully step aside.

Democratic Senate candidates Katie Porter, Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee will have to decide whether they really want to give up their seats in Congress to run against “the first Black lesbian to openly serve in Congress,” or if they want to change their minds and file papers to run for re-election.

If they do, current office-holders who are running for Congress hoping to win the seats held by Porter, Schiff and Lee can change their minds and pull papers to run for re-election themselves.

Newsom could have called a special election to replace Feinstein. But he’s too big a fan of Democracy to do that.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

The U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to hear a case from Oregon that could clarify the muddy mess that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made with its creation of a right to camp on public property if the local government doesn’t offer an adequate number of acceptable shelter beds.

Think back to a time when there were no tent encampments. Remember when the sidewalk crisis meant tree roots and repair costs?

When did it change, and why? Could the Oregon case change it back?

It first became legal to camp on the sidewalks throughout the city of Los Angeles when the ACLU sued L.A. over Municipal Code section 41.18(d), which read, “No person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public way,” unless they were attending a parade.

The case went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Los Angeles lost. The court said section 41.18(d) was “one of the most restrictive laws regulating public spaces in the United States,” and decided that it violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Los Angeles officials could have altered the law to make it narrower in scope, or they could have appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Los Angeles settled the case, and this was the settlement: the city agreed not to enforce the ban on sleeping on the sidewalk anywhere in Los Angeles between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. until another 1,250 units of housing for the chronically homeless were constructed, including at least 625 in the Skid Row area.

You know the rest. It was 2007 when the city agreed to the Jones v. Los Angeles settlement. That’s when tent encampments began to spread throughout the city.

Even though city officials didn’t agree to allow tents on the sidewalks during the day, that’s the way it worked out.

In a settlement, each side supposedly gets something in the deal. What did Los Angeles get in exchange for stopping all enforcement of its ordinance against sleeping on the sidewalk?

The Ninth Circuit’s opinion in the Jones vs. Los Angeles case, the one that said the municipal ordinance violated the Eighth Amendment, was vacated. That meant it could not be cited as a precedent in the future.

But in fact, the city of Los Angeles got nothing in the settlement, because in 2018 the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion in a case known as Martin v. Boise, also on the issue of enforcing a ban against public camping. The judges repeated the reasoning from the Jones v. Los Angeles case to arrive at their decision.

The city of Boise did appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices declined to hear the case, so the ruling in Martin v. Boise is the binding law of the land in the states located within the Ninth Circuit: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. And this was the ruling: in all these states, local governments may not enforce a ban on public camping unless they have enough shelter beds for everyone who needs one.

More lawsuits were filed against more cities, and the law got muddier. What counted as available shelter? What about beds in faith-based shelters? (No, those did not count.) What about shelters that couldn’t accommodate pets? Or couples? Or bulky items? (Los Angeles settled another lawsuit related to bulky items, agreeing to allow an unlimited amount of property to be stored on the sidewalk.)

In southern Oregon, the city of Grants Pass, population 38,000, had three ordinances that prohibited camping on public property with stoves, fires and bedding. Violators were given a civil citation. There were no criminal charges.

Three homeless individuals sued Grants Pass over those ordinances, and the case eventually landed in the Ninth Circuit. The appeals court ruled against the city, expanding the Martin v. Boise precedent to prohibit both criminal and civil penalties for camping on public property unless sufficient shelter beds were available. Since a city has no control over how many people arrive on any given day, it’s entirely possible that no city anywhere will ever have more shelter beds, as defined, than people who need them, as defined. Where does that leave the cities?

It leaves them in trouble. The lawyers for Grants Pass wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court, “Cities want to help those in encampments get the services they need while ensuring that our communities remain safe, but they find themselves hamstrung in responding to public encampments and the drug overdoses, murders, sexual assaults, diseases, and fires that inevitably accompany them.”

Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a brief supporting Grants Pass. In a statement released by his office, Newsom said the courts have blocked “any number of reasonable efforts to protect homeless individuals and the broader public from the harms of uncontrolled encampments.”

The Supreme Court could decide to hear this case and overrule the Ninth Circuit, returning to state and local governments the ability to enforce reasonable and necessary laws to protect public health and safety, and to maintain public spaces for their intended use by the general public.

And then the era of tent encampments will quickly become one of those stories from the past that your grandchildren will never believe.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com or follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Checking the Politician-to-English Dictionary, California edition, I can translate this for you. It means, “Insurance premiums are going up a lot, really a lot, very high, but we’ve all agreed to blame climate change.”

Lara negotiated with insurers who have limited or stopped the sale of homeowners insurance policies in California. The agreement he reached allows the companies to consider climate change and other forward-looking risk assessments when pricing insurance policies in the state. The current regulations allow insurers to consider only the past history of a property, not the potential future risks.

The agreement also requires insurers to write a specified number of policies in areas of high fire risk so those policyholders can come off the state’s FAIR plan, the last-resort insurer that has been overloaded with customers.

The problem here is that these new regulations won’t do anything about the cause of the rising costs.

It’s not really climate change that has increased the size and severity of wildfires, and it’s not climate change that has raised the cost of construction when homeowners have to rebuild.

The cost of construction has been increased by inflation, but California does its part to add regulatory and permitting costs that make everything more expensive.

The size and severity of wildfires, and the costs to insurers that have increased because of it, are the result of policy choices in California that relate to the state’s environmental priorities and ambitious climate goals.

Before 2000, it was common to see firefighters managing prescribed burns, planned and controlled fires that cleared a section of land as a firebreak. But then the California Air Resources Board issued smoke regulations that made it much more difficult, if not impossible, to use that longstanding practice aimed at limiting the size and spread of wildfires.

In addition, state law and policy pushed investor-owned utilities to invest heavily in renewable energy and to build out charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. To the extent that this mandatory investment crowded out funding for maintenance of existing electrical equipment and for mundane activities such as tree-trimming near transmission lines, the risk that a fire would be sparked by equipment was increased.

Because of land management policies in California that restricted the cutting of trees and the prescribed burns that had successfully limited the size of wildfires for generations, wildfires sparked by utility company equipment turned into uncontrolled infernos that did massive and costly damage.

Because of a legal principle called “inverse condemnation,” investor-owned utilities in California that have been given the right to run power lines through private property are held to “strict liability” for all the damage caused by a fire that is started by their equipment.

All these things have consequences that play out over time. In the past, it was routine for the utility companies to receive permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to recover any costs for damages that were in excess of their insurance coverage by adding a surcharge to customer bills for a limited period of time. But in 2017, the CPUC told San Diego Gas & Electric to pound sand when the company sought to recover $379 million in uninsured costs by charging customers an average of $1.67 per month for six years.

Because the state government wants and needs investors to keep buying the stocks and bonds of utilities in order to keep the money coming for the Great Transition to Renewable Energy and Electric Everything, you can cross investors off the list.

That leaves taxpayers, ratepayers and insurance customers, and by now you’ve figured out that they are all the same people.

Taxes, electricity bills and insurance premiums will only go up, but thank goodness climate change has agreed to take the blame.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Maybe it’s time for that to happen in the California Republican Party.

There are 5,236,952 registered Republican voters in California, according to the secretary of state’s latest report of voter registration. That’s a dismal 23.8% of the registered voters in the state, but it’s still a lot of people. Probably 600 of them, organized in small groups statewide, could take control of the California Republican Party.

The legislative session that just ended saw an unchecked Democratic political machine with supermajority control of the Legislature ram through a wish-list of destructive political priorities, including a double-barreled attack on the taxpayer protections in Proposition 13. Democrats who had presented themselves to voters as “moderate” voted in lockstep with far-left “progressives” who would be on anyone’s short list for president of the Karl Marx fan club.

The remains of the California Republican Party in the Legislature mostly watched from the sidelines. The GOP holds just eight seats of 40 in the state Senate, and only 18 of 80 in the Assembly.

This may be due in part to Proposition 14, the 2010 measure that abolished party primaries in state legislative and congressional races. Since 2012, all candidates for these offices are on the same ballot. The two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation or lack thereof. This led to a decline in fundraising for Republican candidates as big donors and political action committees calculated that supporting “moderate” Democrats was a sophisticated chess move that would protect their pieces on the board.

The California Republican Party gradually grew weaker and more irrelevant. And that had consequences for the entire state.

“The weakness of the Republican Party has let the Democratic Party, I think, go get further out than I think the majority of people want,” Gov. Jerry Brown observed in an 2018 interview with NPR. He wasn’t wrong. So many people moved out of the state that after the 2020 Census and redistricting, California lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Brown told NPR he sees “plenty of opportunity for Republicans.” But many Republicans who are active in California politics will tell you that the California Republican Party never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

While the party puts little or no effort into winning elections for statewide and state legislative offices, a great deal of effort is put into winning various votes at the state party conventions, like the one that opens Friday in Anaheim. Frenetic efforts to collect proxies and wrangle delegates keep consultants very busy, all in the service of maintaining control of the party’s machinery, endorsements and money.

A momentary threat to this control emerged about 10 years ago, when supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul very nearly took over the Republican Party of Los Angeles County. In the end, those who held the reins of power eked out a victory by promising to pay off the county party’s $1 million debt, but only if the current establishment kept control through the election of its preferred candidate for chairman. That’s what happened.

What would happen if the playbook of the self-described Liberty Caucus was deployed statewide by frustrated California Republicans, the people who hang up on the CAGOP’s fundraising calls, but not before yelling that the party isn’t going to see another dime until it starts trying to win elections in this state.

What’s in that playbook?

The Liberty Caucus targeted seats on the Republican Party Central Committee. These offices are on the ballot only during the primary election in presidential election years, because that’s now the only time voters receive a party-specific ballot. Only registered Republicans can vote or run for the Republican Central Committee seats. By law, candidates cannot have been registered with any other political party in the previous 12 months.

To try to take over the L.A. County party, the Liberty Caucus leaders persuaded supporters to run for Central Committee seats and then campaigned for their “slate” of candidates. There are seven seats in each Assembly district. All the candidates’ names appear on a page in the primary ballot and voters are asked to “vote for any seven.”

To run for a Central Committee seat, contact your county elections office to “pull papers,” collect about 40 valid signatures of registered voters eligible to vote in that election, file the papers back with the county, and that’s it. There is no filing fee, because there is no salary. And as long as you raise or spend less than $2,000 on your campaign, you are not required to file any campaign reports or statements.

Central Committee members attend monthly meetings and state conventions, and they determine whether party resources will be used to help Republican candidates win in California, or not.

“Not” has been the prevailing choice for quite a while. The result has been the total loss of checks and balances in California government. One party has absolute power. And you know what they say about that.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley