Why did California Assembly Democrats oppose a child trafficking bill?
Zachary Faria
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After an embarrassing debacle, California finally managed to pass a bill that would create harsher penalties for child sex traffickers. But there are still questions that need answers: Why did Assembly Democrats try to stop this, and will the state’s Democratic attorney general undermine it?
The bill would make child sex trafficking a “serious felony” and would create harsher penalties for repeat offenders, which would make them ineligible to be released early from prison. It passed the state Senate unanimously, with all 32 Democrats joining 8 Republicans in backing the bill. It was as bipartisan as bipartisan gets.
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But Assembly Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee spiked the bill, a surprise so great that even Gov. Gavin Newsom logged off Twitter and tried to rally Democrats to regroup on the bill. It has now been pushed forward with several of those committee Democrats reversing themselves, including an embarrassing statement from Assemblywoman Liz Ortega that she only now recognizes that “voting against legislation targeting really bad people who traffic children was wrong.”
But why did this happen in the first place? The answer is equity and the Democratic Party’s obsession with race. In now-deleted tweets, the Twitter account for the California Assembly Democrats defended the opposition to the bill by saying, “The current 3 Strikes model disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, & People of Color communities” and that any bill addressing this issue must “ensure equity.”
In other words, it is racist to punish child sex traffickers if they don’t happen to be white. That was the position California Assembly Democrats were prepared to argue before the rest of their Democratic colleagues, including progressive culture warrior Newsom, forced them to come to their senses.
This may not be a completed story either because there remains a major red flag in this entire ordeal. One of the Democrats who voted against the bill initially was Assemblywoman Mia Bonta. After several Democrats on the committee reversed course, Bonta was one of the two who refused to support it, instead choosing to abstain.
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But Bonta is not just another random Assembly Democrat. She is the wife of Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California. Sure, the bill passed and is supported by Newsom, but if the wife of the state’s chief law enforcement official was actively trying to sink the bill, what does that mean when it comes time to actually enforce it?
All that can be concluded from this is that California Democrats at least recognize that going soft on child sex traffickers would be a bad look. Assembly Democrats didn’t change their mind on this overnight. The entire saga raises far more questions than it answers, despite how bipartisan the passage of this bill initially appears to be.