Lompoc resident Justin M. Ruhge says limits should be placed on the number of bills that the California Legislature may pass.
Our state elected representatives are at it again, producing a blizzard of new bills in the 2022 session.
Just who of everyday Joes on the streets are going to know anything about any of these? These bills are for the biggest paying supporters or the biggest attention getters. Most of these bills are “penny dreadful, junk bills.”
The basic problem is that California has a 120 full-time paid members of the Senate and Assembly, with expense accounts, so these fellows have nothing to do but pass bills.
Each representative is allowed 40 bills, but this was increased to up to 50 bills for the assembly in the 2019 term.
But each bill passed costs the taxpayer money in taxes! Every bill costs us one way or another. Every bill must be managed, so your reps can stand up before you at town hall meetings and say, “Look what I have done for you.”
Remember that they are giving us more taxes, and it is not necessarily a gift. Every aspect of government has to be paid for — the more government, the more taxes for all of us.
We should ask ourselves, “Why are our reps not telling us how much they have reduced the government and how much they have reduced our taxes?” How about giving us the number of canceled old bills each year?
Don’t we care? Why don’t we give them incentives to do so? Is voting them out of office the only incentive?
There are so many bills becoming law that the everyday taxpayer has no idea what they are, and without any malice of his own, he can be found guilty of one or more of them, only to be told by some politically appointed activist judge that their ignorance is no excuse.
At the rate we are going, we will all become criminals at some point in our lives in California by simply going outside our house. It is no wonder that California has more people in prisons than any other state and most countries, and the most highly paid prison guards in the U.S.
A certain outcome for all of these bills is to paralyze the state of California from doing anything sans committing a crime. Total dysfunction is in store for us.
To help limit this out of control bill-passing train wreck from continuing, let’s insist that our representatives sponsor a bill that limits the number of bills in every two-year session to one per representative. A provision of this bill will be to review and eliminate past bills, every year, and to notify the public about the bills.
However even this restriction, if passed, would still result in 120 bills every two years — still more that any citizen could read.
If the governor can get those other bills passed for special interests, why not this one for the taxpayers?
Justin M. Ruhge
Lompoc
