Drinking Sewage Through a Fire Hose

abandon hope, all ye who enter here

The California legislature has plunged into madness this year, distinguishing themselves by their dangerousness even in a state that has been politically unbalanced for a long time. The challenge in measuring the insanity is the scope of it, with a full-time state legislature that regularly passes well over a thousand bills a year.

Legislating at that volume, the politicians shaping California’s future tend to spend as much as an hour debating each bill, churning out a flood of product with inch-deep analysis and discussion. In practical terms, this means that the state legislature is a full-employment-for-lawyers interest group, pouring out nonsense that the courts are forced to attempt, with great difficulty, to parse and apply. Last year’s AB 2098 allowed the state medical board to revoke the medical licenses of doctors who spread “disinformation” on Covid-19, for example, but defined the term so poorly that a court quickly prevented enforcement of the law.

But this year is special, and the degree of the insanity is best measured at the moment by what the legislature won’t do. Current California law imposes sentencing enhancements on people who repeatedly commit violent or serious felonies; with that in mind, Senator Shannon Grove’s SB 14 would define the sexual trafficking of a minor as a serious felony. The bill died in the state legislature last year, then gained momentum this year — passing the Senate unanimously, even getting a yes from Scott Wiener.

This morning, the Assembly Public Safety Committee killed SB 14, in the presence of victims of sex trafficking who appeared to testify in support of the bill. Not one Assembly Democrat would vote for it. It’ll take me a few days to figure out what happened with this vote, but more to come.

While the legislature hesitates to be mean to people who traffic children for sex, Senator Caroline Menjivar’s SB 729 promises to provide insurance-funded infertility treatments for anyone who can’t have a baby — and she does mean anyone:

If you can’t reproduce individually, or with a same-sex partner, you have a medical condition, and your insurance company has to buy you a baby. Manjivar’s “author’s statement” on the bill:

“Non-queer families” can reproduce without medical support, requiring little more than the back seat of a car or a night at the Marriott, while lesbian and gay couples can’t. This is a medical condition, so medical insurance should cover it. A letter to Menjivar from the advocacy group Our Duty nails the absurdity of the bill:

Sb 729 Letter Our Duty

4.45MB ∙ PDF file

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Of course, if a pedophile bought a baby in California, the legislature wouldn’t want the poor dear to be threatened with an inconvenient amount of prison time. They’ve really got their values dialed in.