Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature filed a lawsuit seeking to have a qualified initiative, the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, removed from the November ballot before voters can pass it.

Now there’s another attack on Californians’ constitutional powers of direct democracy: a proposed law that would effectively shield county election officials from any oversight when they throw out voters’ signatures on petitions for a recall, initiative or referendum.

The proposed law is Senate Bill 1441, introduced by Sen. Ben Allen, D-El Segundo. Under current law, if a recall, initiative or referendum is determined to have an insufficient number of valid signatures, the proponents have the right to review rejected signatures and the reason for the rejection. The review must begin promptly, but there’s no time limit to complete it, and there’s no fee.

SB 1441 would slam a 60-day time limit on the review process and require the proponents of the measure to pay, in advance, daily, whatever the county declares to be the cost of staff and equipment needed to review signatures.

This bill is sponsored by the County of Los Angeles and was prompted by the fact that proponents of the petition to recall Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon tried for about 14 months to review almost 200,000 signatures rejected as invalid. But it was L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan who blocked, delayed and impeded the signature review process.

On July 6, 2022, the Committee to Recall D.A. George Gascon turned in 715,833 signatures on recall petitions, 148,966 more than the 566,857 required. By law, the number of signatures required to qualify a recall of a county official is 10% of the number of registered voters in the county as of the most recent report of voter registration filed with the Secretary of State, which was dated January 4, 2022.

With a staff of roughly 400 workers, mostly temporary employees, the county disqualified 88,464 signatures as not registered to vote, 43,593 as duplicates, 32,187 for having a different address, 9,490 for a mismatched signature, and thousands more for various other reasons. In a press release on August 15, 2022, the Registrar’s office announced the rejection of 195,783 signatures, leaving the recall about 46,000 short of qualifying for the ballot.

The proponents exercised their right to review the rejected signatures, but Logan’s office told them they could examine signatures only three days a week between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. The number of volunteers they could bring was limited to 14, and they were given access to only seven computer workstations, operated by the Registrar’s staff.

The review of signatures began in September, and by October the proponents were asking a judge for relief from what they said were the county’s arbitrary and capricious restrictions, unreasonably slowing the process of reviewing rejected signatures. The judge agreed with the proponents that the county had to provide more resources and availability so the work could get done. Logan appealed the ruling, delaying everything further.

By July 2023, the proponents had examined about half of the rejected signatures and found significant errors by the Registrar’s office. To begin with, a Public Records Act request had revealed a discrepancy in the number of registered voters in the county. Logan’s office stated in writing that as of December 31, 2021, “the number of active registrations in Los Angeles County is 5,438,400.” But that’s almost a quarter of a million fewer registrations than the county reported to the Secretary of State at almost exactly the same time, and it would mean the recall proponents needed only 543,840 signatures, not 566,857. In addition, the proponents found tens of thousands of people on the active voter rolls who no longer lived in L.A. County.

The proponents determined that at least 20,587 valid signatures were improperly rejected. Another 5,597 were rejected for signature mismatch based on the county’s failure to comply with current regulations on signature verification.

Though they hadn’t completed the review of all the rejected signatures, the proponents filed a lawsuit citing evidence that they had collected at least 546,234 valid signatures and needed only 540,338 to qualify for the ballot.

However, with the help of your unlimited tax dollars to spend on an outside law firm, Dean Logan was able to battle in court from then until now, running out the clock. This week, the recall proponents gave up, unable to get a trial date scheduled. Voters will have their opportunity in November to vote D.A. George Gascon out of office, as polls have long suggested they will.

Look up the names and contact information of your representatives in the state legislature by going online to findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov. The bill is SB 1441. Let them know what you think.

The California State Association of Counties (CSAC) is backing SB 1441. You may want to call the county supervisor who represents your district to ask why county registrars should be shielded from accountability if they wrongfully throw out valid signatures on petitions.

You probably didn’t know before that the governor and legislature are suing to have a qualified initiative removed from the ballot before you can vote on it, or that the L.A. County Registrar battled in court to forever delay judgment in a case about temp workers throwing out valid voter signatures.

But now you do. Make your voice heard. Protect democracy, for real.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

It’s strange and disturbing because the U.S. government intentionally misled the public about an approved drug that has been around long enough for a cheap generic version to be readily available.

The drug is ivermectin, and the “last chapter” is the settlement of a lawsuit by three doctors who charged that the Food and Drug Administration acted beyond its legal authority with its campaign to prevent the use of ivermectin to treat COVID.

While refusing to admit any wrongdoing, the FDA has now agreed to remove from its website a page titled, “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.” The agency will also remove its social media posts linking to that page, including two memes from August 2021 that featured pictures of horses. One was captioned, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

“FDA is not a physician,” said the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal. “Even tweet-sized doses of personalized medical advice are beyond FDA’s statutory authority.”

The appeals court allowed the doctors’ lawsuit to go forward, agreeing that the FDA does not enjoy sovereign immunity from lawsuits when it is acting beyond the authority it has been granted by law.

After the appeals court refused to dismiss the lawsuit, the agency rushed to settle the case before it could move forward to the discovery phase, when the doctors would have been entitled to obtain documents and testimony under oath.

As background to this story, a few facts:

• Ivermectin is an FDA-approved drug for humans. (There is also a veterinary version.)

• Doctors have the legal authority to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for an “off-label” use, and they do this frequently.

• Under federal law, a new vaccine, drug or medical device cannot receive “Emergency Use Authorization” unless there are “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” That’s according to the FDA’s own website.

Because the government wanted to distribute the new mRNA vaccines for COVID, “Emergency Use Authorization” was necessary. But the vaccines and expensive new drugs to treat COVID could not receive emergency authorization if doctors were out there prescribing long-approved drugs and having success treating COVID with them.

In August 2021, the life-sciences data and analytics provider IQVIA released a National Prescription Audit Weekly report showed that retail pharmacies were seeing a surge in ivermectin prescriptions. That’s when the government’s effort to persuade the public that ivermectin was a dangerous “horse dewormer” began.

The doctors who brought the lawsuit against the FDA were Paul Marik, Robert L. Apter and Mary Talley Bowden.

From the Fifth Circuit decision:

Dr. Apter said he was referred to two state medical boards for prescribing ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Dr. Bowden lost her admitting privileges at a hospital after tweeting about using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients. Dr. Marik lost his positions at a medical school and a hospital for “promoting the use of ivermectin.”

How are we going to prevent this from ever happening again?

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

The group includes 10 environmentalists, 3 teachers, 2 bond underwriters, 8 plaintiffs’ attorneys, 6 professionally certified lunatics, the CEO of a candle company, 231 union leaders and one California business leader, calling in from his home in Toronto.

They last met to address the crisis caused by an epidemic of smash-and-grab mall robberies, a threat to the protected habitat of the endangered Valley Girl.

This time the group was called together for their annual briefing on the imminent end of the world.

“Warming is accelerating at a very concerning rate,” said one of the bond underwriters. “The average temperature in Los Angeles in December was 68 degrees. The average temperature in March was 70 degrees. Here’s a chart that we generated this morning from the latest monthly data, which clearly shows that we are on a dangerous trajectory that will lead to daytime temperatures eventually averaging above 180 degrees if we take no action.”

“We must take action,” the environmentalists chanted.

“A private right of action,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys responded. “Someone must be held responsible for this! The public is entitled to compensation!”

The California business leader spoke up. “The state is already a judicial hellhole,” he said matter-of-factly. “What’s another 110 degrees at this point?”

“Excellent. We’re glad to have you in the coalition,” said one of the union leaders.

“Let’s deal with some old business,” said the candle manufacturer. “We had a deal. I was promised that the governor’s mandate for more electric vehicle sales would cause the collapse of the grid.”

“The problem is that EV sales are falling,” said an environmentalist. “In the second half of 2023, sales of electric vehicles dropped for the first time since 2012. That was not part of our deal.”

“You did what you could,” the business leader said. “You forced dealers to sell them.”

“That still makes me angry,” said the environmentalist. “We should have forced people to buy them. Then it wouldn’t matter that the prices are too high or the charging network is hopelessly unreliable. It wouldn’t matter that the range isn’t what was promised or that the cars don’t always start in cold weather. There should be no choice in the matter. California must lead!”

“We have prepared a better plan,” said one of the certified lunatics. “We’re going to divert more of the gas tax revenue to modifying urban streets with health-based road diets.”

“Yes!” one of the other lunatics chimed in. “We’re going to incentivize low-impact individual wheel development.”

“We would only support collective wheel development,” said one of the teachers.

“As long as it’s mandatory, we’ll consider it,” said an environmentalist.

“Yes, of course,” said the first lunatic. “So here’s the plan: roller skates.”

“I love it,” said one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

“The bill has already been drafted by the lobbyist for the Association of Orthopedic Surgeons,” said the lunatic.

“An elegant solution,” said the attorney.

“I can sell it,” said one of the environmentalists. “Safer than mass transit. Easier to carry than a bicycle. And roller skaters can use the sidewalks.”

“Absolutely not,” said three of the union leaders. “That’s right,” said another one. “Roller skaters must have their own dedicated roller derby lane. Constructed by skilled labor. With a robust apprentice program that draws from our friends and relatives.”

“That will cost more than the bullet train,” grumbled the business leader.

“Let’s do that market-based thing again,” said one of the lunatics. “The thing where we make everything illegal and then sell permits to do it.”

“Yes! A cap-and-trade system for driving!” an environmentalist said gleefully. “The California Department of Technology can create a tracking app linked to a digital driver’s license! If they start now, we’ll have the beta version by 2045.”

“Perfect,” said one of the bond underwriters. “We’ll put a $100 billion bond on the ballot. We’ll call it the Climate, Fitness, Healthcare and Good Middle-Class Jobs Act. And then….”

But that was the end of the recording. Apparently the power went out.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

The case is Murthy v. Missouri, formerly known as Missouri v. Biden. Four federal judges already have determined that the federal government went beyond the boundary of permissible persuasion when it leaned on social media platforms to remove or throttle constitutionally protected free speech.

Particularly unsettling was a comment from the newest member of the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “My biggest concern,” she said to the solicitor general of Louisiana, who was representing the censored plaintiffs, “is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.”

As many observers quickly pointed out, the only purpose of the First Amendment is to hamstring the government. It reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

But Justice Jackson said this: “I mean, I understood our First Amendment jurisprudence to require heightened scrutiny of government restrictions of speech but not necessarily a total prohibition when you’re talking about a compelling interest of the government to ensure, for example, that the public has accurate information in the context of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.”

I’ll bet Justice Jackson will understand it differently by the time the decision is handed down, although I really shouldn’t make bets. I once bought dinner at a steakhouse for the entire editorial board of this newspaper after I lost a bet over who would win the 2020 presidential election. Still, there’s a reason she said what she said.

When Justice Jackson mentioned “First Amendment jurisprudence” and “heightened scrutiny” and “compelling interest of the government,” she was referring to the balancing tests devised by the court over the last 100 years to work around the fact that when the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, it did not apply to the states.

As late as 1900, in the case of Maxwell v. Dow, the justices said the first 10 amendments to the Constitution “were not intended to and did not have any effect upon the powers of the respective states,” adding, “This has been many times decided.”

Everything began to change in 1925. The Supreme Court was considering the case of an anarchist named Benjamin Gitlow and decided to “assume that freedom of speech and of the press — which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress — are among the fundamental personal rights and ‘liberties’ protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.”

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and for 50 years, the Supreme Court had said consistently that it did not make the Bill of Rights apply to the states. But in 1925, after everybody who voted on the Fourteenth Amendment was out of the picture, a new era of constitutional interpretation began.

The Supreme Court never ordered the states to “make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Instead, the court gradually developed balancing tests made up of different levels of “scrutiny” when a state infringed a right that the court had declared to be “fundamental.”

For example, in 2005, California enacted a ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. The Entertainment Merchants Association challenged the law as a violation of the First Amendment. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, California had to satisfy “strict scrutiny” by demonstrating to the court that the law was “justified by a compelling government interest and narrowly drawn to serve that interest.” Five justices found the state’s evidence to be “not compelling” and they struck down the law. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion.

But this type of analysis applies to actions taken by the states, not by the federal government. The plain language of the First Amendment forbids the federal government from abridging freedom of speech. No balancing tests are needed to get there.

Something similar was part of the decision in the landmark Second Amendment case, New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in 2021. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, which rejected “any means-end test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.” The Second Amendment itself “is the very product of an interest balancing by the people,” Thomas wrote, and a “second step” of means-end scrutiny is “one step too many.”

Three justices signed a furious dissent from the court’s decision to stay the injunction, effectively letting censorship continue. “Govern­ment censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s deci­sion is highly disturbing,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch. And also, “Does the Government think that the First Amend­ment allows Executive Branch officials to engage in such conduct?”

I’ll bet that there are at least five votes on the court to order a halt to the government’s censorship scheme, and that the justices will draw a bright line between allowable persuasion and impermissible coercion so this can never happen again. If I lose the bet, I’ll buy the plaintiffs dinner at a steakhouse.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Reality, it turns out, really punches above its weight.

In Monday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge David Carter considered whether to approve an independent audit of L.A.’s homelessness spending on programs such as the Inside Safe initiative run by the office of Mayor Karen Bass. Inside Safe has moved 21,000 people indoors since December 2022, according to the mayor’s office, although the accuracy of this statement may depend on your definition of “moved.” 

It may also depend on your definition of 21,000. The mayor’s office says 2,152 people were moved into interim housing and 402 were moved into permanent housing, and how that adds up to 21,000 is a question that two separate sets of auditors may soon be exploring.

Judge Carter has this case because the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights sued the city and county of Los Angeles for not providing shelter for the people who were living on downtown sidewalks. A settlement was reached in 2022, but reality was not a party to the settlement, which is how it ended up back in the courtroom.

The settlement called for the city to provide shelter for at least 60% of the street-dwelling population in each city council district by deadlines, provide various reports and documentation of its progress, and return the sidewalks to the purpose for which they were intended.

If reality had been at the table, it might have pointed out that there will never be enough money in the whole known universe to fulfill the terms of the settlement, because city officials define “shelter” as a free studio apartment built by workers paid the highest-in-the-universe prevailing wage and staffed by organizations that get juicy government contracts and then pay their executives enough to buy a second home.

Reality might have added that as long as state law continues to require that taxpayer-funded free apartments must be offered to people who are using hard drugs and intend to continue doing so, there are going to be some problems.

The L.A. Alliance wants the city to pay a $6.4 million fine for failing to comply with the terms of the settlement, but Judge Carter seemed hesitant about that, saying he was “uncomfortable” with that penalty. 

There will be another hearing on Friday, at which the judge may order an independent, outside audit of L.A.’s spending on homelessness programs. He has said $600 million vanished into those programs in the years before Karen Bass was elected mayor. Her Inside Safe program has received another $250 million in this year’s budget, and City Controller Kenneth Mejia says he plans his own audit. Other city officials insist the mayor’s program is outside Mejia’s authority.

While they were bickering about who wasted more of your money, the federal government dropped a bombshell into the discussion.

Remember when the Project Roomkey homeless-housing-in-hotels program was initiated in April 2020 because of COVID, and California officials announced that 75% of the cost would be paid by the FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Then, in January 2021, FEMA said it would cover 100% of the cost of housing vulnerable homeless individuals in hotel rooms during the crisis.

However, FEMA has now informed California that it only agreed to pay for hotel stays of up to 20 days once the governor’s stay-at-home order was lifted, which happened on June 11, 2021.

Oops. 

This all makes it even more likely that city and county officials will try to put tax increases for homelessness programs on the November ballot. 

We’ll see how that works out.

After the not-so-fast-there reaction of voters to the governor’s $6.38-billion Proposition 1 plan for homelessness, reality may have other ideas.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

In this case, the president is Donald J. Trump, and what legendary journalist Bob Woodward told him is a story in itself.

In 2019, Woodward began a series of recorded interviews with then-President Trump for a book that was scheduled to be published before the 2020 presidential election. The book, eventually titled “Rage,” may have been planned as a history of the Trump foreign policy, but when COVID hit, Woodward’s tape recorder captured both what the president was doing and what people were telling him to do.

Surprisingly, one of the people telling him what to do was Bob Woodward. Framing his questions as simply relaying the concerns of “people I’ve talked to,” Woodward sounds like a messenger for the permanent government bureaucrats, intelligence officials and national security “experts” that Trump derided as incompetent during his 2016 campaign and his presidency.

It’s all on tape, or rather, on a set of CDs called “The Trump Tapes.”

When Trump talks about his good working relationships with the leaders of North Korea, China and Saudi Arabia, Woodward lets Trump know that “people I’ve talked to” object to the president’s “shadow communications system.” This system appears to be simply a telephone, used without the permission of the people who work for him.

In another call, Woodward badgers Trump to apologize for the phone calls with Ukraine’s President Zelensky that led to his first impeachment. “I did nothing wrong,” Trump tells the journalist, but Woodward doesn’t let up. “I’m going to tell you from experience — if Nixon had gone on TV and said ‘I apologize,’ it would have gone away.”

“I wouldn’t apologize if I did nothing wrong,” Trump said.

“It would go away,” Woodward insisted.

“It would be a disaster,” Trump said. “I did nothing wrong.”

But the wildest call in the collection is a recording from April 5, 2020, about the COVID pandemic. Woodward leads into it with a voice-over recorded later, a device he uses repeatedly to add context, argue with Trump’s assertions and share his low opinion of the former president.

Woodward tells his audio audience that he spent weeks interviewing the “medical experts,” including Anthony Fauci, and it was apparent that Trump “was not listening.” Therefore, this could not be a “regular interview,” Woodward said, because he “had a personal responsibility beyond just being a reporter.”

On the recorded call, Woodward begins by asking Trump, “Are we going to go to full mobilization? People, at least that I’ve talked to, say they want the feeling of full mobilization.”

Then Woodward asserted that the federal government should take over COVID testing, but Trump told him that testing is a state responsibility.

“Still,” Woodward responded, “a lot of people are saying we need a Manhattan-like Project.”

That’s a reference to the government, scientific community and military working together in secret to build the atomic bomb.

During the call, Woodward urged Trump, “If you come out and say, this is full mobilization, this is a Manhattan Project, we are going, pardon the expression, b**** to the wall, that’s what people want.”

“We’re doing a great job,” Trump said. “No matter how good a job I do, I’ll never get credit from the media and I’ll never get credit from Democrats who want to beat me desperately in seven months.”

“If you go out and say this is full mobilization, we are in a Manhattan Project state,” Woodward began, “the medical supply chain. The people I talk to say they still aren’t satisfied with it.”

At this point you can hear Trump exhale with exasperation.

“They wonder if you’re going to federalize it,” Woodward said. “Is that possible?”

“We’re getting very few complaints,” the former president answered.

Woodward asserted that “people I’ve talked to” want to know if there’s a system for unemployment benefits. Trump said he’s “totally opposed” to distributing the money “the way Democrats wanted it,” through the unemployment offices. “Many of them have 40-year-old computers,” he said.

Trump was certainly right about that.

“I’m just telling you as a reporter,” Woodward said, that the country needs “a national order” to shelter in place, federal control of the food supply, a person who will be the “focal point of coordinating with all the other countries ,” “a national definition of ‘essential worker,’” a ban on airline travel and the shutdown of China’s wet markets. He said something also needs to be done about near-empty airline flights and “small government Republicans.” And the country needs a “vaccine antibody czar.”

Woodward asked Trump if he was meeting regularly with his CIA Director, Gina Haspel. “Do you feel you know what’s going on in the world?” he asked.

“Better than any president has known in 30 years,” Trump answered.

Woodward reminded Trump that he has been interviewing presidents for 50 years.

“I know, I’m listening to every word you’re saying,” Trump said.

But at that point it sounds as if Trump has reached a conclusion about the conversation. He tells Woodward that he has “people waiting downstairs” in a meeting, but asks him to read out “the list of the things you said.”

When the call finally ends, Woodward’s wife, journalist  Elsa Walsh, is heard on the recording.

“What do you think? Woodward asked.

“You were really shouting at him,” Walsh answered.

“I was. To get a word in edgewise,” Woodward said.

Former President Trump filed a lawsuit against Woodward over the commercial release of these tapes, which he said was unauthorized. However, if you listen to them, Trump comes off far better than the reporter who was trying to run the country from behind a tape recorder, and far, far better than the bureaucrats who were trying to run the country from behind a reporter.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

In California, we’re marking it by trying to figure out how a new law raising the wages of fast food workers ended up with a controversial and disputed exemption for Panera Bread restaurants, and why everyone in on the negotiations had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

So the outlook for sunshine in California is, at best, partly cloudy.

The story of this new fast food workers law begins in September 2022, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 257, the Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act. The law established a 10-member council in the government to establish wages, hours and working conditions in one particular sector of the economy. It applied to fast food chains.

Before the ink on the governor’s signature was dry, the restaurant industry launched a signature-gathering effort to qualify a referendum for the ballot. That froze the implementation of the law until the voters had the opportunity to decide its fate in the November 2024 election.

This caused great anger among the union special interests that lobbied for the bill, and eventually the result was another bill that aimed to reform the referendum process. Signed into law by Newsom on September 8, 2023, Assembly Bill 421 changed the law to allow the proponents of a referendum to withdraw it from the ballot up to 131 days before the election at which it would go before voters.

This is what enabled the backroom negotiations for a new law. The result was AB 1228, signed by the governor on September 28, 2023.

AB 1228 looks a lot like AB 257, but it removed a provision that made fast food corporate owners financially liable, along with franchisees, for workplace violations. The franchisees were left with a law that requires a minimum wage increase to $20 an hour effective April 1, and also sets up a government council that functions like a permanent union contract bargaining session, except without the bargaining.

Panera Bread was exempted, Bloomberg News reported, after Gov. Newsom pushed for a strangely specific exemption for fast food restaurants that produce and sell bread as a stand-alone menu item as long as they were doing it before September 15, 2023. Newsom denies pushing for it, and denies, without evidence, that Panera Bread is exempt.

KCRA’s Ashley Zavala reported that the final negotiations over AB 1228 were conducted by the Service Employees International Union, which demanded that the other parties at the table sign non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs. The other parties were fast food corporations and industry trade groups. Franchisees were not at the table. They were, as the old saying goes, on the menu.

From the editorial board: Non-disclosure agreements in Sacramento turn lawmaking into plunder

The referendum “reform” that spawned these secret negotiations was modeled on a 2014 law that did something similar for initiatives. Senate Bill 1253 allowed initiative proponents to remove their measure from the ballot after it had qualified, if they were able to work out an acceptable deal with the legislature for something else.

Other initiatives that qualified for the ballot and then disappeared after private negotiations include 2022 measures that addressed plastic waste and medical malpractice lawsuit caps. In both cases, the legislature passed a compromise bill.

This process has allowed the direct democracy powers in the state constitution, which date to 1911, to become just one more grind in the sausage factory. Voters can sign petitions all day long, but in many cases all they’re doing is empowering a special interest group to wield leverage with state lawmakers, or other special interest groups, in secret negotiations.

Repeal AB 421 and SB 1253. Let the sun shine.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

It happened when President Joe Biden was speaking about his record on safety. “All Americans deserve the freedom to be safe,” Biden said, “and America is safer today than when I took office.”

That was too much for one man in the gallery. “Abbey Gate!” he screamed in an anguished voice, “Second Battalion, First Marines!” Still shouting, he was hustled out the doors of the chamber.

That man is Steve Nikoui, who was the guest of Florida Congressman and U.S. Army veteran Brian Mast. Nikoui is the father of Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, a U.S. Marine from Southern California. Lance Corporal Nikoui was one of 13 U.S. military service members killed by a suicide bomber at Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate in August 2021, during the Biden administration’s hideously incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan. He was 20 years old.

Steve Nikoui was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for interrupting Biden’s speech with his unbearable pain.

Another family grieving the loss of a child to the catastrophic failures of the Biden administration turned down an invitation to attend the State of the Union. The parents of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley stayed home, having buried their daughter just days before.

Related: Biden’s State of the Union address was a spectacle of nonsense

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled Biden to “Say her name” when he mentioned the border. Biden was prepared for the taunt. He had pre-positioned a campaign button with Laken Riley’s name on it, and he held it up for the cameras. “Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” Biden fumbled.

“He should have said ‘undocumented,’” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN later.

Laken Riley was out for a run on the University of Georgia campus when she was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a criminal illegal alien who could have been held in custody and deported, but instead was released into the United States.

She’s far from the only victim of “undocumented” violent criminals.

Last week a stunning report was released by the Center for Immigration Studies about President Biden’s use of his “parole” authority under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The language of the law  (updated in 1996 in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act) allows the government to “parole into the United States temporarily” individuals who otherwise are not eligible to be admitted, but “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

The Biden administration has defined “case-by-case” to mean that every month, up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can use a cell phone app called CBP One  to get permission to fly into the United States from their home countries and be “paroled” for two years, with work authorization.

These migrants have to pay for their flights, and they’re supposed to have a financial sponsor or other contact in the U.S. The app runs some kind of biometric identification and criminal background check, although law enforcement officials have said digital criminal records in some countries may not be shared with the U.S. or may not exist.

The Biden administration began this expanded parole program in 2022. Through December 2023, it has allowed 327,000 people to fly into U.S. cities from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The Associated Press reported that about 1 million people have come into the United States through the parole program by land or air. In another expansion of the program, migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and Ecuador can now use the app to fly in and be paroled into the United States.

The Center for Immigration Studies filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out which foreign airports the migrants were departing and at which U.S. airports they were arriving. The government refused to say, asserting that to divulge the information would create “operational vulnerabilities” at airports.

How reassuring.

The parole program accounts for only a fraction of the millions of illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. under the Biden administration’s policies. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that there were more than 300,000 encounters with illegal migrants at the southwest border just in December, without counting “gotaways” who were detected but not apprehended.

Meanwhile, Biden used his State of the Union speech to rage against lawmakers for hesitating to send even more of your tax dollars to Ukraine. He invoked the name of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to demand that lawmakers “wake up” to the threat posed by Russia. Maybe Biden can’t remember that Russia was a U.S. ally in World War II, or that FDR sat next to Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta Conference where the postwar world was arranged.

Biden’s faulty memory also confuses the events of Jan. 6 with the U.S. Civil War, even though the riot was a full hour and a half shorter than a screening of “Gone With the Wind.”

Biden’s foreign policy has been a worsening catastrophe. He has led the United States into a dangerous proxy war with Russia, abandoning deterrence and diplomacy for a taxpayer-funded arms bazaar that enriches cronies and donors. He is sending U.S. service members to the Gaza coast for operations that could become a trip wire for a wider conflict. He has made national security and public safety secondary to his policy goal of enabling millions of illegal immigrants, even from terrorism-infested countries, to come right in.

Some presidents have achievements in foreign policy that help them win re-election even when their domestic policies fail.

Biden is 0 for 2.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Castro announced on May 1, in what turned out to be the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, that anyone who wanted to get off the island could go to the Port of Mariel, get on a boat and leave.

Carter responded with open arms. He set up the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program to provide temporary status to the migrants along with access to asylum processing. Under the authority of the Refugee Act of 1980, Carter offered to grant asylum to 3,500 people

More than 125,000 came. The Mariel boatlift, as it is known, lasted into October.

Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan in November.

It may have been Democratic muscle-memory that made President Joe Biden’s team hastily schedule a visit to the U.S. Southern border on the same day that former president Donald Trump had previously announced he would be going to the border. Polls show Biden’s approval rating at around 40% and his disapproval rating getting close to 60%. On the issue of immigration specifically, which shows up in polls as one of voters’ top concerns, the February Harvard-Harris poll of more than 2,000 registered voters found 65% disapproval of Biden’s job performance.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, there were 301,983 enforcement encounters at the Southwest Land Border in December 2023. That’s a record-breaking number. In  December 2020, the month before President Joe Biden took office, there were just 73,994.

CBP reported 1,734,686 enforcement encounters at the Southwest Land Border in fiscal year 2021 (October 2020 through September 2021). The next year the number rose to 2,378,944. Then to 2,475,669.

But Biden didn’t want to be photographed with massive numbers of migrants. “The President’s team has selected an area to visit that has had virtually nonexistent activity in recent days, weeks, and months compared to elsewhere along the border,” reported Fox News’ Bill Melugin, “San Diego sector, Tucson sector, and El Paso sector are where the overwhelming majority of illegal crossings are taking place right now.”

Pretty pictures don’t fool anybody. Millions of people, hundreds of thousands per month, have entered the United States as illegal immigrants since Biden took office and signed a stack of executive orders that aggressively changed the nation’s policies.

“We have rescinded so many Trump immigration policies, it would take so much time to list them!” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told MSNBC in a 2021 interview.

In February, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson released a list of 64 things Biden did to “open the border.” New York radio personality Mark Simone posted the list on WOR’s website, an indication that there are voters even in deep-blue New York who are especially interested in the details of this issue.

And that’s no surprise, given that New York taxpayers have to pick up the cost of housing an estimated 178,000 undocumented migrants who have recently made New York City their new address. “The city has spent $1.45 billion on migrants over the 2023 fiscal year, and once estimated that the cost of housing migrants could balloon to $9 billion over the next two years and $12 billion over the next three,” reported Commercial Observer. The Hotel Association of New York said migrants now occupy 16,000, or about 12%, of New York City’s hotel rooms.

If that’s the impact of just 178,000 asylum-seekers in one city, what’s the total cost to taxpayers of providing for millions all across the country?

Another growing concern, and one with intense political ramifications, is the impact on public safety. Last week, 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley was kidnapped and brutally murdered in broad daylight while she was out for a run on the University of Georgia campus. The suspect is a Venezuelan migrant. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that Jose Antonio Ibarra entered the country illegally near El Paso in September 2022 and was released due to lack of detention space. There are also recent reports of unlawfully present individuals arrested for the rape at knifepoint of a 14-year-old girl in Louisiana and murder of a 2-year-old in Maryland.

In 2016, the shooting death in San Francisco of 32-year-old Kate Steinle by a homeless illegal immigrant became a flashpoint in the presidential election.

This time we’re sure to hear more about the dangers of drugs coming over the open border. In May, the Centers for Disease Control reported that U.S. deaths due to fentanyl almost quadrupled in the last five years.

Politicians often defend unlimited illegal immigration with anecdotes about hard-working people who provide essential services to Americans while supporting their families in their home countries. Here’s a number for you: $656 billion. That’s the estimated total of money transfers in 2023 to and from the U.S. and other countries, up from $647 billion in 2022. It’s more than double the budget of the state of California, every year.

You’d almost think U.S. border policy is intentionally enabling drug dealing, human trafficking and organized crime, and all the government wants to do is watch.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

It was Feb. 20, 2019, and Justice Ginsburg delivered the opinion of the court in the case of Timbs v. Indiana.

In that case, police in Indiana had seized Tyson Timbs’ Land Rover SUV, which he bought for $42,000 with money he received from a life insurance policy when his dad died. The state sought civil forfeiture of the vehicle because Timbs had pleaded guilty to drug dealing and conspiracy to commit theft. However, the fine for the crime was only $10,000 and the vehicle was worth four times that. Taking the vehicle was an excessive fine, the judge ruled, and excessive fines are prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court of Appeals agreed.

But then the Indiana Supreme Court reversed the ruling on the grounds that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines applies only to the federal government, and it does not bind the states.

Yes it does, the U.S. Supreme Court said unanimously. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote separate concurring opinions stating that they would have arrived at the decision through different reasoning. But the conclusion was the same.

“There can be no serious doubt that the Fourteenth Amendment requires the States to respect the freedom from excessive fines enshrined in the Eighth Amendment,” wrote Gorsuch.

“The Eighth Amendment’s prohibi­tion on excessive fines applies in full to the States,” wrote Thomas.

“The Excessive Fines Clause traces its venerable lineage back to at least 1215,” wrote Ginsburg, “Magna Carta required that economic sanctions ‘be proportioned to the wrong’ and ‘not be so large as to deprive [an offender] of his livelihood.’”

Timbs v. Indiana was a landmark decision. It was the first time the Supreme Court had held that the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause applied to the states. Just nine years earlier, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court had acknowledged in a footnote, “We never have decided whether … the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines applies to the States,” pointing to the 1989 case of Browning-Ferris Industries of Vt., Inc. v. Kelco Disposal, Inc., in which the court declined to decide the issue.

McDonald v. Chicago was itself a landmark decision. In that case, the Supreme Court said for the first time that the Second Amendment applies to the states as well as to the federal government.

“When ratified in 1791, the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal Government,” Justice Ginsburg wrote.

How that eventually changed is a little-known part of U.S. history that is about to protect former President Trump from the state of New York.

The Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War, in 1868. It read, in part, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

However, this did not immediately make the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. That change began more than 50 years later, in 1925. In the case of Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court floated the idea that freedom of speech and of the press are assumed to be “among the fundamental personal rights and ‘liberties’ protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the states.”

Gradually over the next century, the court would pick and choose provisions of the Bill of Rights, declare them to be “fundamental” or “deeply rooted” in our history, tradition and “scheme of ordered liberty,” and make them binding on the states. (The history of this process can be read in Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court in McDonald v. Chicago.)

The Eighth Amendment reads, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

The “cruel and unusual punishments” clause was declared applicable to the states in 1962, in Robinson v. California. The “excessive bail” provision has applied to the states since the 1971 case of Schilb v. Kuebel. And the “excessive fines” prohibition has been binding on the states since the 2019 Timbs case.

New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron fined the former president and 2024 frontrunner an astronomical $355 million plus $100 million (and counting) in interest. Engoron also prohibited the Trump Organization from taking loans from financial institutions that do business in New York for three years, and he banned Trump personally from working as a director or officer of any corporation or entity in New York for the same period. Engoron even refused Trump’s request for a 30-day extension of the due date to pay the fine, which New York requires before he can appeal the judgment.

This was a civil fraud trial, without a jury, in which the judge found Trump guilty of giving his assets a too-high valuation to get good loan terms, even though the bank adjusted those values downward before approving a loan that was paid back fully and on time, with interest.

New York Attorney General Letitia James campaigned on a promise to sue Donald Trump, calling him an “illegitimate president.” She said she’ll ask the court to seize Trump’s buildings if he can’t come up with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash in time to pay the fine.

We’ll see. It may be easier to go up against Trump than to argue with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley