Come Visit Late-Weimar California For a Virtual Hour, and Leave Feeling Ashamed and Disgusted

The Democratic Party is sick, and it has to reform or die. I’m not arguing that the Republican Party is healthy, or that it works, and the current uselessness of the limp and passive GOP majorities in both houses of Congress doesn’t suggest that the alternative to Democratic Party dominance is anything great. As a Californian, watching from a distance, I’m also getting the sense that single-party Republican rule in Texas is going bad in a hurry, but I’m not sure. Texans, weigh in.

Whatever the condition of the GOP is, though, the Democratic Party is just…some…whole other thing. It’s gone. The party as a whole has no compass, no reason, no connection to reality, no decency, and no ability to engage in an argument without retreating to the mindless cover of ORANGE MAN BAD. There are a very few individual exceptions, and you’re going to read about one here.

So.

The California legislature has posted video of this morning’s debate about making the solicitation of sex for pay from older minors, 16 and 17 year-olds, a felony — a proposal that met a final death on the Assembly floor this morning. You can watch the whole debate here. Note that this looks like a three-hour video, but a long opening stretch is just the legislature broadcasting the empty floor from the intended start time of the session, while they were delayed for more than an hour by Democratic maneuvering behind the scenes to prevent a discussion they knew Republicans intended to bring to the floor. So the action actually starts at 1:54:20, as the chair recognizes San Diego Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, a Republican. You can fast-forward to that time stamp without missing a thing.

My sincere suggestion is that you ignore me, and don’t bother to read my framing and discussion of the debate, if you would rather just watch the whole thing and draw your own conclusions. I think the discussion is startlingly clear, and you don’t need me to tell you what it is. If you’re into long acts of brain-torturing self-degradation, again, click this link, then go to 1:54:20.

But if you don’t want to watch more than an hour of stomach-turning video, here it is in digested form:

In 2024, a Republican state senator from Bakersfield, Shannon Grove, introduced a bill to make it a felony to solicit a child to obtain sex in exchange for payment. The sex is already a felony, statutory rape, but if you solicit a child and then get arrested before you can get to the hotel room, the solicitation is a weak misdemeanor that prosecutors don’t tend to file. Democrats objected to the bill, and tried to block it, which was the second time Democrats tried to kill one of Grove’s bills creating harsh penalties related to child sex trafficking. They failed to stop the bill, but they managed to water it down, limiting the felony charge for the solicitation of minors to the solicitation of children up to the age of 15.

This year, Democratic legislator Maggy Krell introduced a bill to close the gap, proposing to make it a felony to solicit a 16 or 17 year-old minor for paid sex. Remember that a Democrat wrote this bill, because it will help to reveal the howling emptiness of majority debate in the legislature this morning, as most Democrats spent the whole debate screaming at the mean Republicans. As they have for the last three years, Democratic leaders wrestled the bill down and stabbed it to death in the darkness, amending it in committee to make the language of the bill deplore and lament the sex trafficking of minors, but without criminal penalties. Summarizing, the new version of the bill that made it out of committee says that it is the sense of the State of California that having sex with children is less than ideal, and one day we might do something about it.

This morning, Republicans tried to use the Assembly’s Rule 88, “Motion to Set Special Order,” to force the whole body to reconsider the bill in its original form, unamended. This maneuver made Democrats, with a couple of exceptions, extremely angry, and a quite ugly debate began.

The first thing that happened is that the subtext busted out into the open. Democrats have been politically not-saying, carefully mumbling around their unstated objections to the bill: We just, you know, need to study it, and uh, think about it some more. You can watch Democratic Assemblyman Nick Schultz, the chair of the Public Safety Committee (and the person who actually neutered the bill), do the we need to study it more maneuver here. The only hint of a meaning is that he isn’t sure the bill in its current form is “equitable,” but he doesn’t say what that means.

And then. The Republican legislator proposing to restore the felony language to the bill, Carl DeMaio, is gay. In his comments on the bill at (2:14:10), DeMaio says that, as a gay man, he thinks it’s offensive to argue — here’s the discussion legislators have been having behind closed doors — that a bill criminalizing the sexual solicitation of children will disproportionately harm gays and lesbians. The bill, he says, has been improperly “spun as anti-LGBT.”

I’ve been disgusted by the California legislature for decades, and the response from Democratic Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez nonetheless caught me by surprise. I didn’t realize they could sink this far. I won’t even try to describe it. Just — here (the video freezes for a second in the middle, but the audio is unbroken):

So in an exchange between two gay men, DeMaio said the legislature should criminalize the solicitation of children for sex, which has nothing at all to do with sexual orientation, and the gobsmackingly stupid Gonzalez said, in response, that it’s deeply offensive to vote against “civil rights for gay people.” You don’t have to be a livestock-dumb piece of human garbage to serve in the California legislature, but apparently it doesn’t hurt your chances.

From there the whole thing descended into the usual forms of ritual chanting, and you’ll be shocked to learn what Democrats pivoted to so they could argue against the felony measure:

These Republicans CLAIM that they oppose the sexual trafficking of children, Mister Speaker, but have they considered that ORANGE CHEETO HITLER!?!?!? Have they faced the fact that Orange Man Bad, Mister Speaker!?!?

Once that door opened, it didn’t close. Why were Republicans pretending to care about the sexual exploitation of children? Because, this idiot said, they were just “following their fascist in chief”:

What would be the logic of that argument?

1. We think that adults shouldn’t pay to have sex with children

2. OH I GUESS YOU WORSHIP YOUR ORANGE CHEETO HITLER

They have no logic, they have no thoughts, they have no arguments, they have no substance, they have no ability, they have no mind. They’re a thing that makes noise, Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump. At no edge of the debate did Donald Trump’s personality have anything at all to do with the question of buying children for sex, and they just couldn’t stop. If you pull the cord on a Democrat, it makes the Trump noise.

Maggy Krell was an exception, today, and Republicans spent the morning expressing appreciation for her effort. Meanwhile, the final Democratic deflection of the day — the Alamo of Democratic Party sleaze — was that Republicans were playing politics by trying to force the original version of the Democrat-authored bill to the floor. This is Nick Schultz, the committee chairman who amended the bill to remove the felony provision:

But the bill the Republicans were “playing politics” by supporting was a Democratic bill, written by one of their own colleagues. The argument never made any sense at all. Not that this is something that ever stops them. The aye vote Schultz asks for in this clip is the one that carried the day: the procedural vote to continue debating only the amended bill that removes the felony.

Throughout the discussion, by the way, the tedious Democratic assemblyman chairing the session kept ordering Republicans to watch their decorum. He was very focused on conservative fingers, and interrupted every time he saw one:

The California legislature: It’s like somebody put a whorehouse in a mental hospital.