Over the last dozen years, Democrats have gained, lost and finally nailed down supermajorities in the California Legislature. Now they hold more than 75% of its 120 seats . Having achieved total control, Democratic leaders could — and did — completely ignore the dwindling numbers of Republican legislators, now just 18 in the 80-member Assembly and eight in the 40-seat Senate.
Republicans have been allowed to carry only minor pieces of legislation and are completely frozen out of budget negotiations , thanks to a 2010 ballot measure lowering the required budget vote to a simple majority, which Democrats and their labor union allies sponsored. Last year one Republican state senator, Shannon Grove, defied the odds by relentlessly pushing legislation to increase penalties on those who traffic in children . After her bill was blocked in an Assembly committee, she raised a stink in the media about Democrats protecting sexual predators.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders felt the heat and the measure was resuscitated, passed and signed by Newsom. Other Republicans took note, realizing that growing public concern about crime clashes with the Democratic Party’s aversion to putting more offenders behind bars by increasing criminal penalties.
Since 2010, pressure from federal courts to reduce overcrowding in state prisons has spawned two major ballot measures — Proposition 47 in 2014 and Proposition 57 two years later — which reduced sentences for nonviolent .
