• U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) released a July 1 statement condemning the Supreme Court decisions in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, which he said undermine free and fair elections. “In a pair of 6-3 decisions today, the Supreme Court turned its back on the basic foundations of our democracy and further opened the door to discrimination and big-money influence in our elections,” Padilla said in the statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee undermines the legacy of the federal Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in 1965 to prevent racial discrimination in the electoral process. In the six decades since the Voting Rights Act’s bipartisan enactment, its protections have proven themselves indispensable.” Padilla also opposed the Supreme Court decision made on the same day in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, where “the court’s conservative majority struck down a California law promoting transparency for big-money donors to nonprofit organizations,” Padilla said in his statement. “The decision threatens our campaign finance and transparency laws, and further opens the door to dark-money influence in our elections.” Padilla encouraged Congress to pass bills relating to voting rights. “That means passing both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” he said. “Our democracy depends on the voices of the people, and if the Supreme Court will not protect them, Congress must.”
• In a July 1 Facebook post, Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo) advocated for more funding in the California budget to go toward wildfire response and prevention. “As we head into what the experts expect will be the worst wildfire season on record, we [cannot] afford to cut funding for critical prevention projects,” Cunningham wrote in the post. “While the Legislature tried to appropriate $1 billion in wildfire prevention funding earlier this year, the governor’s budget includes less than half of that. This issue needs to be a priority.” According to a June 29 CapRadio article that Cunningham linked in his post, the governor “rolled back a more ambitious wildfire prevention plan set by his predecessor, and this week his administration nixed more than half a billion dollars in promised fuel-reduction spending, an investigation by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom has found.”
• On June 29, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) and a few congressional colleagues announced legislation to protect coastal communities from sea level rise, called the Living Shorelines Act of 2021. The bill would create two new federal grant programs through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Padilla’s office. One of the programs will “assist states, localities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in constructing living shorelines,” and the other program will “provide federal research grants to study living shoreline development and effectiveness to better protect coastal communities and ecosystems from climate change,” according to a statement from the senator’s office. A living shoreline involves using native eelgrass and oyster beds to create reefs. These reefs “decrease wave energy, thereby reducing flooding and erosion of shorelines,” the statement explained. The bill would provide $50 million in federal funds for these projects and $5 million for research grants. “We are facing a climate crisis, and the impacts are being felt in California and across the country,” Padilla said in the statement. “The Living Shorelines Act makes critical investments in natural infrastructure projects to better protect communities while restoring habitat and stimulating local economic development, taking us one step closer to climate change resiliency.”
This article appears in Jul 8-15, 2021.
