Appropriations Committee Keeps California Clean Money Supporters in Suspense

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Sara S. Nichols

If the California Appropriations Committees were a summer movie, it’d be a blockbuster. After all, they’ve got all the right ingredients: suspense, mass murders, graveyards. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never liked horror films—I can’t stand the suspense.

Today the California Assembly Appropriations Committee moved AB 583, the Clean Money and Fair Elections Act by Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) to the “suspense file,” leading me to wonder whether, once again, the suspense will kill me before we have public financing of elections in California. What rule, concept or decorum is actually “suspended,” I’ve long since forgotten. What I do know is that the suspense is not whether a bill will go “to suspense,” the suspense is whether it comes off.

And off it should come. As Susan Lerner, Executive Director of the California Clean Money Campaign, the sponsor of AB 583, said today, “the issue is no longer how can we afford to pay for it, but how can we afford not to pay for it?” Indeed, it is long overdue to inject clean public financing into California elections. However, this bill, coming as it does on the heels of (losing) Proposition 89 on last year’s ballot, faces a tough challenge in the legislature, even though it contains only parts of that initiative.

Sacramento insiders know that virtually every bill worth passing (i.e., every bill with a price tag) moves to “suspense” in Appropriations. The legitimate rationale used to be that bills that would cost the taxpayers over a certain amount of money per year would all be considered together. This process would ensure that California could afford the legislation it passed.