Our View: Olsen trying to spread a little sunshine

It’s such a common practice that you can find the definition in the glossary of the California Legislature.

“Gut-and-amend” is a legislative technique of taking a bill that has already been introduced, removing all of its contents and amending it with something entirely different. A bill that could have started out to authorize money for a bridge in San Diego becomes a bill to allow higher pension contributions for state employees.

Far too frequently, the reason this takes place is an outright attempt to hide the law’s contents from us, the governed – and even those who have to vote on it.

Kristin Olsen wants to put a halt to the most odious aspects of gut-and-amend. Admitting that it’s sometimes useful for moving bills through the process quickly, she is carrying a California Constitutional amendment to require all bills be in print for at least 72 hours before a vote can be taken. That way, the public and other lawmakers will have an opportunity to at least read the bills before they actually vote on them.

It won’t stop the entire gut-and-amend process, but it would cut back “on the midnight, backroom deals” from which they are conceived, said Olsen, the Republican leader of the Assembly and former Modesto city councilwoman. “The goal isn’t to stop lawmaking; the goal is to put sunlight on it.”

Some have tried to cast this as a Republican good-governance measure. But the co-author of a similar bill in the Senate is Lois Wolk, a Democrat from Davis. And that makes it even better. We like it when members of both parties combine their efforts to shine a little light on how laws are made.

But Olsen points out that such problems don’t really require laws. The speaker of the Assembly could simply mandate the rule change, requiring the 72-hour breather before passage. “If I was speaker, this the first change I would make,” she said.

Those who oppose Olsen’s law – virtually all Democrats – say that such rules can stall the momentum in passing a good law. Some say putting 72 hours between a deal and a vote would give special interests time to work their nefarious magic on good laws and turn them bad.

We believe just the opposite is true. If lobbyists start sniffing around a bill, suggesting changes that benefit only their clients, then having extra time would allow the original authors time to expose their devious efforts.

Before Olsen was born, back in 1953, Modesto’s Ralph M. Brown represented the 30th Assembly District. He rose to the Assembly’s chair, and his most long-lasting legacy was passage of the Brown Act – California’s first “sunshine” law. It required that nothing could be voted on in secret, that the people’s business must be conducted in public and that agendas must be made public well in advance of any meeting:

“(T)he public commissions, boards and councils and the other public agencies in this State exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business. It is the intent of the law that their actions be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly. The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them.”

Brown was a Democrat. Olsen’s a Republican, but she is carrying on in a fine Modesto tradition of spreading sunshine. We hope her amendment passes.

This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Our View: Olsen trying to spread a little sunshine."