Psychedelic therapy and workers' rights bills fail to advance in California's tough budget year
As California faces a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, lawmakers must make tough decisions about which of the more than 1,000 measures still alive in the Legislature this year will not make the cut.
On Thursday, they stopped hundreds of bills from advancing to the Senate and Assembly floors via the so-called suspense file. It’s a mysterious process where lawmakers on two committees decide — with no explanation — which bills will get a chance to become law later this year and which ones should not move forward.
Typically, lawmakers pass roughly three-quarters of the bills during the process. But this year, something “out of the ordinary” happened, veteran lobbyist Chris Micheli said. He estimated that the Assembly Appropriations Committee only approved about 65% of bills on its suspense file, leaving more than 230 bills without a path to move forward.
Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the committee chair, said the state’s budget troubles are “no secret.” The committee held a bill to create a government-funded universal health care system, which Wicks has supported in the past.
“We have an obligation to balance the budget here in California,” she said. “We can’t go into debt, so we have to be very judicious with the budget.”
Across both houses, lawmakers held hundreds of proposals. Here are some of the highlights:
REPARATIONS
It was a good day — mostly — for proponents of reparations for Black Californians. The state Assembly overwhelmingly passed a state apology for the legacy of slavery, and the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced several other proposals to rectify harms against descendants of enslaved people.
Key proposals to establish an agency to administer reparations programs and help Black families research their family lineage; to pay Black families for land that was taken unjustly through eminent domain; and to create a state fund for reparations programs all advanced.
But bills to give property tax and financial assistance to descendants of enslaved people were held by the Senate committee. State Sen. Steven Bradford, a Los Angeles-area Democrat who authored the bills, said that was largely because of the state’s budget troubles.
“It’s a financial challenge this year,” Bradford said. “But we always knew it wasn’t going to be a one and done. This is going to be a multiyear approach.”
PSYCHEDELIC THERAPY
The Senate committee stopped a bill that would have allowed people 21 and older to consume psychedelic mushrooms under professional supervision. The legislation wouldn’t have allowed for personal possession and use.
The bipartisan bill was introduced after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last year vetoed legislation that would have decriminalized the possession and personal use of several plant-based hallucinogens, including psychedelic mushrooms.
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