Demand CA Senate Public Safety Committee Members Do Their Jobs and Stop Killing Safety Legislation

Hold Senate Public Safety Committee Members Accountable By Making it Harder for Them to Kill Legislation By Simply Not Voting

State Senators are elected to propose, draft, and amend legislation. They also have the power to filibuster (delay or block legislation). A Senator’s voting record is a crucial measuring stick for voters to gauge whether or not to re-elect a particular candidate. The one thing a State Senator is NOT elected to do is avoid participating in a vote on legislation, for the purpose of avoiding accountability.

In Sacramento, however, some members do exactly that, and it is particularly egregious on our Public Safety Committee: members remain silent or leave the room while a vote is in progress to avoid a “no" vote being recorded on their record. They do not want to blemish their records with votes that are in direct opposition to common-sense public safety and/or the public’s wishes.

Scott Weiner, Nancy Skinner, Steven Bradford, and Aisha Wahab routinely remain silent rather than vote “no” to kill common-sense legislation and avoid having a “no” vote attributed to them.

Listen to the grieving moms in this shocking news clip to hear the gut-wrenching stories of how these Senator’s silence affected important and common sense public safety legislation regarding fentanyl…legislation that, if passed, would make Californians safer.

It’s time to send a message to our elected Senators that we expect them to do their jobs and have the decency and maturity to be held accountable for their voting record.

To use CalMatters Digital Tracker referenced in the video, click here: https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/

For more on this: Power is never having to say ‘no.’ How California Democrats kill bills without voting against them

Tell CA Senators we're watching them and will not tolerate any further erosion of public safety.

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Dear Senators,

As a voting member of the public I am writing to let you know that I am disheartened and a bit shocked that I can no longer assume that my State Senators are doing their jobs. State Senators are elected to create and vote on legislation. Due to your common practice of either remaining silent on a vote, or leaving the room during the vote in order to avoid actually voting, I will now be tracking you on Calmatters digital tracker. This “failure to vote” tactic is egregiously used routinely by the following members of the Public Safety Committee: Scott Weiner, Nancy Skinner, Steven Bradford and Aisha Wahab. These cowards lack the courage of their own convictions. Last year, due to their lack of voting, they unabashedly killed at least 8 public safety bills, 3 of which were fentanyl-related. Their non-voting was a miscarriage of democracy that deeply weakened our collective public safety. Failing to vote is a moral breach of a Senator’s fundamental duty to their constituents and it makes a mockery of the very reason a State Senator is employed. By remaining silent and refusing to vote, the above-named Senators have abused their positions in the Senate, and on the Public Safety Committee. Not only have they disgracefully prioritized their own political standing by dodging “on record votes” they callously ignored the testimony of hundreds of people, grieving parents, experts, and law enforcement and, in doing so, endangered our public safety and allowed legislation to die that would have been passed had it gone to a vote on the Senate floor. 

It is grotesquely inexcusable that 4 Senators were allowed to kill a bill with 22 bipartisan co-sponsors simply by remaining silent. Senators Weiner, Skinner, Bradford and Wahab, are demonstrably unfit to serve on a Public Safety Committee and should be summarily removed from that particular committee. Please know that I, along with thousands of others, will now be tracking votes and making them more widely known to the public. California State Senators should now be on notice that your constituents have been given a powerful tool to track your voting record and we will hold you publicly accountable in both the positive and the negative. 

Thank you for being public servants with all the challenges such a job entails. For those Senators who dodge votes, we will make that public and we will, at first chance, vote you out of office. To those Senators who take your responsibility seriously and vote, I thank you for leading by example.

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Hold Senate Public Safety Committee Members Accountable By Making it Harder for Them to Kill Legislation By Simply Not Voting