A Distortion That Becomes More Egregious Every Year

The title is taken from this article by veteran California political commentator Dan Walters at CalMatters regarding the California Legislature's practice of putting together a hodgepodge of legislation in a single bill near the end of the session and calling it a "budget trailer" bill.  Legislative rules for the budget are different from those for other legislation, but the "trailer" bills are just items that "affect" the budget, and nearly everything does.  As noted in my post last week, this evasion of the constitutional single-subject rule was used this year to stick a horrifying stack of "get out of jail free" cards into a health funding measure.  Walters describes this debacle:

A prime example occurred two months ago when one of the trailer bills was loaded up with a massive rewrite of the state's criminal laws, allowing virtually anyone convicted of a felony, even rape or murder, to avoid prison if they are declared in need of psychiatric treatment and they receive it for two years.

Gov. Jerry Brown, who has made softening California's criminal laws a hallmark of his final term, backed the change but prosecutors howled that it was a get-out-of-jail card for vicious criminals and complained, with good reason, about the diversion language being buried in a massive "trailer bill" relating to social services rather than being openly debated and decided.

The backlash was so sharp, the Associated Press reported last week, that Brown now wants to modify psychiatric diversion, denying it to those charged with particularly vicious crimes and giving judges more leeway to apply it prudently.

"While nothing's perfect, this version right now solves a majority of the issues," Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager, the new president of the California District Attorneys Association, told the AP after the revision was circulated.

The issue of mental health diversions aside, what happened is a shameful example of how the trailer bill process is being distorted to enact policies that probably could not make it if handled in the normal - and democratic - way.

A Distortion That Becomes More Egregious Every Year curated from Crime and Consequences Blog