Two ways our legislature sneaks laws past you

Two of the Legislature’s sneakiest procedures were on display last week as it began its annual sprint to adjournment.

Their names – “suspense file” and “trailer bill” – have little meaning to 40 million Californians outside the Capitol, but they are critically important to those inside.

After bills go through the Legislature’s policy committees, most are routinely sent to the “appropriations committees” of both houses and most of those are then placed in a sort of limbo called the “suspense file.”

As deadlines for final action approach, the committees meet and their chairpersons run down the list of suspense-file bills, simply announcing which will proceed to floor votes (and almost certain approval) and which will “be held in committee,” the euphemism for killed.

There are no public discussions, no real votes, no explanations of why bills are given red or green lights – and no fingerprints on the carcasses of those that die. Last week, legislative leaders made decisions in secret on 635 measures.

Then there are “trailer bills,” measures that in theory are enacted to implement the state budget. They qualify for the fast-track parliamentary treatment accorded the budget itself and therefore are convenient vessels for making political policy that has nothing, really, to do with the budget.

A prime example came two months ago when one trailer bill was loaded up with a massive rewrite of the state’s criminal laws, allowing virtually anyone convicted of a felony, even rape or murder, to avoid prison if they are declared in need of psychiatric treatment and get it for two years.

Gov. Jerry Brown, who has made softening California’s criminal laws a hallmark of his final term, backed the change but prosecutors howled that it was a get-out-of-jail card and complained, with good reason, about the diversion language being buried in a massive “trailer bill” relating to social services rather than being openly debated.

The backlash was so sharp, Brown now wants to modify psychiatric diversion, denying it to those charged with especially vicious crimes and giving judges more leeway.

“While nothing’s perfect, this version right now solves a majority of the issues,” Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager, the new president of the California District Attorneys Association, said of the revision.

The issue of mental health diversions aside, what happened is a shameful example of how the trailer bill process is being distorted to enact policies that probably could not make it if handled in the normal – and democratic – way.

Legislative leaders and governors are very likely to continue the practice. Though the budget was enacted two months ago, 11 new trailer bills popped up last week, some truly relating to the budget but others not so much. One, for example, would change state law affecting employees of one Kern County hospital; another would exempt efforts on the 2020 census from state contract law; a third would affect San Diego County’s elections for county supervisor.

Those and other pieces of the pending trailer bills have nothing to do with the budget and continue a distortion that becomes more egregious every year.