Having passed the bill, now they’ll read it

Posted by Terry Francke, General Counsel | Dec 3, 2017 | Awareness Area: Government, Legal Issue: Public Information, News, Uncategorized | 0 |

GOP senators’ rush to pass the tax bill couldn’t happen in the California Legislature—thanks to a recent ballot measure.

Today’s reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post note something of a frenzy among elected members, legislative staff and lobbyists to get eleventh hour amendments into the Senate Republicans’ tax bill before the vote of passage in the wee hours of this morning.

For whatever comfort it may be worth, such behavior could no longer happen in the California Legislature, thanks to Proposition 54, the ballot measure passed by voters a year ago that now requires a California legislative bill to be in print and on the Internet for at least 72 hours before it goes to a final vote in the house.

The constitutional amendment by and large puts paid to the longstanding prior reality reflected in former State Senator H. L. Richardson’s book, What Makes You Think We Read the Bills?

About The Editor

Terry Francke, General Counsel

Terry Francke has a 39-year history of helping journalists, citizens and public officials understand and use their First Amendment and open government rights. With CalAware, Francke has authored comprehensive and authoritative guidebooks to California law on access to government meetings and public records and the news gathering and publication rights of journalists. Focusing on these issues in public forum law, he supervises CalAware's legislative and litigation initiatives; conducts workshops on legal compliance; helps design public records audits; supports local sunshine ordinance drafting efforts; writes CalAware Today, a blog on current developments and proposals in the law and best practices; and answers countless queries by phone and e-mail from citizens, journalists, public officials and employees, and lawyers. Francke previously served 14 years as executive director and general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, after a 10-year post as legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has served as an advisory panel member to the National Center on Courts and the Media; taught journalism law at the Department of Communication at Stanford University; and served as an expert contributor to the 1994 major revisions to the Ralph M. Brown Act and the 2004 ballot proposition making open government a basic right of citizens under the California Constitution. Francke is a 1967 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1979 graduate of McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific. Prior to his legal career, Francke worked as a weekly newspaper editor and in military and local government public affairs positions.

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