What has Sebastopol's new Assemblymember Chris Rogers been doing in Sacramento?

Part 1: Rogers held a Sebastopol Town Hall on Monday, answering questions on energy, the environment and redistricting

Chris Rogers faced a mostly supportive crowd at his first Sebastopol Town Hall. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

Chris Rogers, assemblymember for the 2nd District, came to Sebastopol on Monday night, to talk about what he has been doing in Sacramento since he was elected to the Assembly in November 2024. He spoke to a small crowd at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center.

The 2nd Assembly District is one of the largest and most diverse legislative districts in California. It includes western Sonoma County (including Sebastopol), northern Sonoma County (including the northern half of Santa Rosa), plus all of Del Norte, Trinity, Humboldt and Mendocino counties.

Before launching into his report from Sacramento, he introduced Sebastopol Mayor Stephen Zollman, who spoke briefly about his priorities for Sebastopol. Rogers also noted that Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore was in the audience. Gore is running for the state senate to replace Mike McGuire, whose term ends in December 2026.

Rogers noted that his plan for the evening was to give a brief overview of his work in the assembly then to spend the bulk of the meeting answering questions from constituents in the audience.

The Sebastopol Times will be printing his comments in full, lightly edited for coherence, in two parts. We will summarize the questions from the audience.

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Roger’s Report from Sacramento

We are at this point in the legislative break. It is a small window before we go back in the middle of August and finish all bills that need to be introduced this year, that need to be passed by the middle of September.

Most of our legislative priorities this year have been driven from three separate sources, three different categories.

One, first and foremost, has been reacting to or proactively protecting from what we see coming out of the federal government. We can talk about some of that legislation that we’ve worked on, but for instance, I am a co-author on a piece of legislation to prevent ICE agents from wearing masks and from avoiding revealing their identity. That obviously is a very significant circumstance that, if you had asked us in January would we need to prepare for, some of you may have said yes, but that was not the norm, and that is certainly something that has had a huge impact on our communities, and we can talk about that.

The second bucket has really been the committees that I serve on, and the ability to have an outsized influence in those policy areas. This year, as a freshman member, I was assigned to the Budget Committee. I serve on the subcommittee that specifically oversees all climate, transportation, electricity and utilities funding. I serve on the Utilities and Energy Committee; the Transportation Committee; Water, Parks and Wildlife; and Communications and Conveyance, which for most of us is the Broadband Committee…It also oversees Ubers, taxis and all telecom—so it’s a pretty interesting committee.

And then the third bucket is we have this amazing, diverse district that has different needs from other areas of the state. And oftentimes I tell people we represent five counties: three blue counties and two State of Jefferson counties, and the only thing that they all agree on is that Sacramento does not listen to any of them. So we have tried really hard this year to introduce legislation that meets the needs of our local communities, specifically areas that have not felt heard by Sacramento.

I tell people all the time, we [District 2] have one assemblymember for five counties. LA has 27 assembly members for the county of LA by itself. It is a lot easier for folks in LA to get attention on issues than it is for us. So we’ve really made a point of emphasizing local issues: we’ve done a bill that’s specific for Hopland and a bill that’s specific for Crescent City, because those are areas that have, quite frankly, never had legislation.

I’ll highlight really fast, before I kick it over to you, four bills in particular that we’re very proud to have authored this year. Most of them are still going.

One that I’ll start with has a very immediate impact for Sebastopol and for West Sonoma County and it relates to the speed limits on state highways. Currently, when you do a speed assessment on a state highway, it is written in law that you have to set the speed limit to the 80th percentile. Basically, if you are speeding through there and setting the record for the fastest, you will impact what we are required to set the speed limit to. And in areas like Sebastopol, areas like West Sonoma County, we have seen that folks are impacted, because the speeding occurs and you have collisions. We’ve seen pedestrian and car collisions as well, and right now, in state law, the only way to get that lowered is to do another speed assessment…or to have a fatality. And we, working with our locals, introduced a bill that we’ve made all the way to the Senate floor that would allow for a speed assessment to take place and for Caltrans to work with your local council members and supervisors to say whether or not that speed assessment actually makes sense for the area, and in fact, to lower the speed limit, especially in areas with high tourism or a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists. It sounds like a really simple thing and common sense, but for our district, whether it’s West County, whether it’s Del Norte County, this is a significant issue that has never received attention in Sacramento.

We’ve also tried really hard to address historic inequities with our tribal partners. Our district has a couple dozen tribes in it. We’re fairly confident that that’s actually the most tribes out of any of the Assembly districts. We just got back from a trip where we spent three days with the Kurok Tribe up in Humboldt County to talk about their fishery practices and their fire management practices. We’ve introduced two bills specifically for our tribal partners. One is the first recognition of tribal water rights. When the rights of waters up in Humboldt and Del Norte and Siskiyou counties were last adjudicated over 100 years ago, Native Americans were not considered people and therefore had no rights, and so we are working to correct that.

The second bill that we are working on with our tribes addresses youth in our foster care system. In our district in Humboldt County, 40% of all foster youth come from tribes, and yet state law does not allow for partnerships between county social services and tribes for the purposes of keeping youth out of the foster care system and being proactive in its services. So we’re correcting that, and it’s a bipartisan bill. It’s flown through with no no-votes. We are fighting the federal government on it because they don’t like the bill, but we fully anticipate that we’ll have this on the governor’s desk in the next couple of weeks.

Then the fourth bill that I’ll highlight—and it has been our most significant fight—is we decided to take on the pharmaceutical industry in our first term in the State Assembly. For our district, health care access means supporting our clinics and our clinic systems. What pharmaceutical companies started to do during the pandemic was put restrictions on a federal discount drug program that our FQHCs—our federally qualified health clinics that are relied on to provide care in rural areas—to say that you could only do that program and get those discounts on those pharmaceuticals through one pharmacy for an entire clinic system. So in our area, if you have Open Door, which is a provider that does Humboldt and Del Norte counties, they get to select one pharmacy for people to do this discount program through. If that’s not near your home, that’s too bad—you can’t do it. So we have led the effort to push back on that, to remove those restrictions and make sure that you have those continued investments in your local health care systems. It’s the number one kill bill for the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve actually had 12 lobbyists assigned to it the whole year—we are job creators in our office (laughter)—and we’re going to continue to fight that bill through because it’s so important to our district.

Outside of that, the big name of the game for Sacramento this year has been looking at the high cost of living and how we can make sure that regular folks can continue to live in California—whether it’s bringing down utility rates, whether it’s bringing down the price for housing, protecting against the tariffs and what we know that that’s going to do to commodities and goods, and really creating a more sustainable and bolstered economy for California.

Questions and Answers

A small but passionate crowd attended Chris Rogers’ Sebastopol Town Hall at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center. (Photo from Assemblymember Chris Roger’s Facebook page)

QUESTION: The first two questions involved a plastic incinerator and pyrolysis plant at SOMO Village in Rohnert Park, which according to the questioners, was never permitted and never went through public review, even though it is near an elementary school and residential neighborhoods. (Note: Rohnert Park is not in Rogers’ district.)

This got on my radar, literally, this afternoon. I saw somebody shared a change.org petition about it. So this is in Sonoma Mountain Village, which is south of our district—it’s in Damon Connolly’s district, your Assemblymember for that area. I don’t know a whole lot to be candid…I just haven’t had a chance to look into it yet.

But I will tell you that this project is not a one off. There is actually a movement in Sacramento, after Abundance came out [the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson], to really remove some of the process from some of these projects. In fact, you saw that in the budget this year, there was a push by the governor and by the legislature to do a complete overhaul of CEQA [the California Environmental Quality Act] with no public process whatsoever for the discussion.

And, I’ll tell you, I voted against it for three reasons. One is because CEQA is so significant that you should have public discussions about it. But then also, there were three areas really that they messed up the bill. One was they messed up the Endangered Species Act definition, which would impact existing projects and plans. The other is they accidentally removed tribal consultation from it, which was something we had just put into CEQA. And then the third, which is probably related to some of this discussion around this project was that they had a new definition, waiving CEQA for what’s called advanced manufacturing, but they didn’t really explain what advanced manufacturing was. Come to find out—especially as we’re dealing with Moss Landing and other types of battery fires—that with no CEQA analysis, people would be able to approve massive manufacturing, like battery plants, and so we’ve got to fix some of those components.

I don’t know if that’s directly related to this project. I’ve got to learn more, but just know that that is, overall, a theme that you’re going to see from the legislature is this push-pull between ‘There’s a high cost of living, and so therefore we need to do something different’ versus ‘We’re going to throw out particularly environmental protections and processes and make things move faster so they’ll pencil out.’

Then I’ll tell you the final reason that I voted against it is just, frankly, the Governor made the entire budget contingent on passing a bill that had not been written yet. So on Thursday, we were expected to vote on the state budget that had a provision that the budget would not be enacted if we didn’t pass this bill that wasn’t a bill yet. On Friday, they released the language of this bill, and then on Monday, we were expected to pass that bill with no public discussion as well. So I ended up voting against it.

[Roger then advised the questioners to reach out to their Supervisor, David Rabbitt, and Assemblymember Damon Connally.]

QUESTION: Can you please speak to the Polluters Pay Climate Super Fund bill that you co-authored?

Yeah, so this was one of the more significant environmental bills that was proposed this year, called Polluters Pay. It essentially created a fund in which the businesses that are the highest polluting businesses would have to pay into this fund for remediation and to do restoration work for the damage that’s been done.

The bill was held. I was a co-author of it. It was authored by Dawn Addis, who is one of my colleagues from the Santa Barbara area. She’s a wonderful environmentalist. It was held this year, but it’ll come back next year.

One thing that I’ll just say as a kind of a corollary to that, I’m the only freshman that is serving on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and Cap and Trade Re-authorization Committee. So California, a number of years ago, created our first Cap and Trade program, and we authorized it once. It is the model for cap and trade programs that do two things: one is it becomes ever more restrictive for the amount of carbon that businesses can emit in the state. So that’s reducing our greenhouse gas impact by itself. The other thing that it does is it creates carbon credits that create an economic system where in which, right now, they can purchase some of those carbon credits to meet the need, and that money from those carbon credits then goes into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, called GGRF, to be able to spend on environmental priorities—things like regenerative soil programs, alternative manure programs for agriculture—things that overall give us a good bang for our buck for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

That fund, the program itself is set to expire in a couple of years, so we are looking to re-authorize it this year. The challenge is because it is set to expire with no re-authorization, companies are not purchasing or bidding on these carbon credits at the rate that they had been. So dollars that we have allocated for environmental purposes are actually coming in below that, because the governor has said that this isn’t a priority for him, and therefore people don’t know if the program is going to continue and they’re spending less on those credits. We think that if we re-authorize the program, we’ll see that go back up, and we’re retooling to make sure that those funds are going towards the biggest bang for our buck in terms of carbon programs, like carbon sequestration or carbon capture—a lot of redwood trees and restorative work that we’re trying to put in there.

And I’ll tell you, I’m the only freshman on this committee because we were accidentally on an email. And then they sent a follow up email that said, ‘Just kidding, no freshmen are allowed to be on it.’ I just showed up anyway, and they kept me. So in being there, I’m able to help actually craft this policy moving forward. There’s only about eight or nine of us that are actually working on it, but you’ll see it pass, I’m certain by the end of the year.

Polluters Pay will come back next year, but GGRF functionally does the same thing, just not at the same scale. So it’s at least something that we’re continuing to advance.

QUESTION: The next question involved “producer responsibility” legislation—legislation that requires producers of polluting materials, such as plastics, to pay for the full lifecycle cost of their products.

There are a number of bills that look at producer responsibility as well, basically making sure that the cost for a good captures the total impact of that good. And right now, we have socialized a lot of the negative costs in exchange for providing a profit to the corporations that are building these products.

My favorite reframe for folks on plastics specifically is that every single piece of plastic that has ever been created is still in existence today. Plastics don’t go away. They break down into micro plastics and make it into our waterways and now actually our bodies as well. So there’s a study about two years ago that was done that found that 70% of breast milk had micro plastics in it when tested, and they’re starting to find it in heart samples, especially in youth who spend a lot of time outdoors on playing fields. That’s where those plastics are going.

So you have seen a push from the legislature to start to address those impacts. For instance, one of my colleagues, Tasha Porter, who’s from San Diego, she has a bill this year that I supported that is now in the Senate, that looks specifically at the micro beads that are put into cosmetic products. These have already been banned in the European Union, but they continue to persist in California. This bill would prevent that from happening moving forward.

We are also looking at different ways to do restorative practices for areas that have over-relied on plastics. My wife is a nurse at Kaiser. One of our first big discussions that we had when we first started dating was about a plastics recycling program that she tried to start because healthcare has shifted away from cleaning of metal products—because it’s more energy intensive, there’s more risk to it—and instead, for every new surgical case, they open up a whole new kit of plastics, and there’s really no ability to recycle that.

A couple of years ago, maybe about 10 years ago now, China changed what’s called the National Sword Policy, where they stopped accepting plastics and recyclables from California and the United States…And yet, you have seen a lack of investment in California on the recycling infrastructure. You have the CRV [California Redemption Value] on your aluminum can and now also your wine bottles (Thank you, Bill Dodd, for that one). But you oftentimes don’t have a place where you could actually redeem that. And so there has been a discussion about how to build that resource throughout all of California and particularly in rural areas, because it just doesn’t pencil out. And if you have places like Safeway that are no longer doing the CRV program, is it really fair to continue to charge people for a CRV that then their product isn’t going to be recycled anyway?

When I was on the city council, I chaired the Environmental Quality Committee for the League of Cities. We asked the governor for $50 million to invest in these types of facilities. We got $5 million. It’s a start, but we have to do a lot more, otherwise there’s going to be no capacity to address the environmental impact of plastics and of other aluminum, glass, all of that sort of thing.

QUESTION: I really dislike PG&E. Is anything being done to rein in PG&E’s profiteering?

The answer is yes. So I’m going to start off by saying, first of all, I’m a co-author on a piece of legislation to prevent PG&E from being able to use rate payer funds to lobby or to spend on campaigns. First of all, that’s got to happen.

The other I’m a co-author on is a comprehensive bill around how we actually fund wildfire infrastructure.

So quick tangent: the way that we fund our infrastructure related to electricity is about 300% as expensive as it should be. Because the way that we do that is we roll the cost into what’s called a GRC, a general rate case. So the way that works is PG&E has a plan, and PG&E says, ‘We’re going to do all of this work because it’s going to make us safer.’ That plan then goes to an agency where their only viewpoint on it is, ‘Will this make us safer to wildfire?’ If the answer is yes, the plan goes to the CPUC for a general rate case, where they set your rates consistent with being able to deliver that plan. Now, obviously, I just simplified a really complicated process, but you get the gist of it.

The problem is, PG&E has a guaranteed 10 1/2 percent rate of return on the capital investments that they make in their infrastructure. So the incentive structure is backwards. They have an incentive to do the most expensive work, not the most effective work.

We have a bill that will change that. Right now, to underground lines, it costs about $4 million a mile, and that’ll make you a lot safer. Absolutely it will, but there is no regard for how that $4 million a mile is going to impact your rates. There are other things that they can do, such as this new fast switch system, where whenever something impacts the line, it shuts off the line. It’s like a public safety power shut off, but in the moment, rather than proactively turning off the electricity. And it’s shown to be about 96-97% effective. That is way cheaper than undergrounding a line. Or you can insulate the line, which is about $900,000 per mile instead of $4 million per mile. And again, it’s about 96-97% effective. But PG&E wants to do the thing that is the most expensive, because they get a guaranteed rate of return on that.

On top of that, because PG&E’s bond rating is so terrible, the cost for them to get money is higher, so it costs them more to borrow money then they pass that on to us as rate payers. What we are looking at in Sacramento is a couple of things. The bill that I am a co-author on 1) it would take away that 10 1/2 percent rate of return as a guarantee. 2) It would make sure that the agency that looks at the plan and says, ‘Will this make us safer?’ also has to evaluate that plan from our perspective of, ‘Is this the fastest and the cheapest way to protect a community?’ not just ‘Will it make us safer?’ And then the third thing that it does is it actually would take away PG&E’s funding of this infrastructure, so that the state would bear that. The state’s bond rating is better, so it would bring down the cost overall.

So we’re doing a lot around trying to bring down energy affordability. We also are looking at your bill. If you look at it, you have a climate credit and a gas credit, $8 to $15 every single month. Nobody knows what it is. We are looking to realign that so that instead of giving that every single month, we would aim it directly at what’s called the volumetric rate of your energy assessment for the months where it’s the most expensive. So that would lower the overall rate at a time where it’s harder to produce and deliver energy, and we’re expanding the authority of CCA, or your Community Choice Aggregators, to be able to compete and provide that opportunity for folks. So it is a big issue. We’re doing a lot on it.

QUESTION: The CPUC (California Public Utilities Commission) seems to be as much of a problem as PG&E is, because they seem to just rubber stamp whatever PG&E wants. It’s very frustrating as a community member that we have no say, and you can go to all their hearings, and they look at you and they smile, and then they pass on another rate hike. How do we change that?

Yeah, it’s frustrating for you as a constituent. It’s frustrating for me as a legislator. These are folks that are largely appointed by the governor, and there have been discussions about reforming the CPUC, both in terms of how they’re structured and what the scope is, but frankly, it’s going to take a ballot measure.

In particular, I have one colleague who’s very interested in taking broadband out of the CPUC, having a separate Office of Broadband and systematically moving parts of the CPUC to different agencies. The mandate for the CPUC right now is untenable. They regulate everything from railroads and taxis to broadband to utilities. They don’t have the capacity to do all of that. They don’t have the specialists to do all of that. And if you actually look at their positions that they have over the last decade to two decades, they have lost a lot of their auditor function and folks who can actually look at these general rate cases and say whether they’re fair, and have moved a lot more into the policy realm, and that is something that the legislature is very interested in addressing.

Couple that with CARB, the California Air Resources Board, and there really is a feeling in Sacramento of ‘We need to rein in the bureaucracy and make sure that there’s more accountability to it.’ We had a really bad oversight hearing in which the head of CARB was asked the question ‘When you pass new policies, new priorities, how do you account for the cost of living and the impact that people are feeling?’ And the answer was, ‘We don’t.’ That was the worst answer that they could have given legislators. So now there is a discussion about, how do we rein that in, making that more accountable.

QUESTION: The next questioner expressed appreciation for Rogers’ involvement in measures protecting gender-affirming care and a guaranteed wage for incarcerated firefighters. The questioner also asked his opinion about a letter that was sent to Assemblymembers about the genocide in Gaza.

I supported a number of bills around gender-affirming care, making sure really we protect anybody. And one thing that I will highlight that the legislature has been really involved in is gender affirming care around immigration status and the privacy aspect of that, making sure that that data can’t be weaponized against folks. So we’ve been working a lot on that front.

The second bill you mentioned guaranteed a wage for incarcerated firefighters. Previously, incarcerated firefighters, which our community benefited from in our wildfires, have not been paid a fair wage. They risk their lives. They’re out in dangerous conditions. They’re breathing that same bad smoke that our firefighters are, and they’re making pennies. So one of my colleagues brought forward this bill a couple of years ago; it failed. They brought it forward again last year; it failed. They brought it forward again this year and was able to build a coalition, and I was very proud to support that bill, which is continuing to move forward. It recognizes that just because there are circumstances that folks have found themselves in to be incarcerated doesn’t mean that the work and the service that they’re doing to our community isn’t valuable and isn’t important.

So the final question was about…the humanitarian crisis that’s happening in Gaza and there’s no other way to call it. Whatever, wherever it started, and the discussions around being able to defend yourself or needing to focus on the impact of terrorism—that’s all gone. We have crossed that Rubicon to the point where we have a genuine crisis on our hands, where people are dying, where we are preventing food and aid and shelter from reaching people who need it, and Congress needs to step up. Bernie Sanders brought forward a measure last week that wasn’t supported. I see more and more folks who are coming to his assistance, and we have to call it what it is. And I’m sure we’ll look at how we can best do that from California as well.

QUESTION: The next questioner disliked Mike McGuire’s Great Redwood Trail and urged Rogers to defund it. He asked instead to extend the SMART train further into northern California.

I’m gonna start by breaking your heart and just tell you the Pro Tem [Maguire] has way more impact on the budget than I do as a as an assemblymember, and I do have a number of constituencies up north that are really hoping for that tourism revenue. We were actually just in Blue Lake, which is the northern terminus—similar to Cloverdale, with their SMART station—and they’ve already built all of the infrastructure for the Great Redwood Trail to welcome folks, because they know what that means for their community.

But you touched on a really important issue that gives me a chance to talk about another issue or priority that I’ve been working on, and that’s the expansion of green hydrogen. So we had a bill this year that would have brought the cost of producing green hydrogen from about $10 a gallon down to about $3 a gallon. And why that’s significant is when you talk about electrification and when you talk about meeting our transportation and our greenhouse gas emission goals, the challenge that you run into is the actual physical weight of the battery makes it really prohibitive to do either locomotives or long-haul trucking. But if you had an alternative, like green hydrogen being produced through offshore wind, onshore waves, geothermal—we also have a geothermal expansion bill that we’ve been working on in our office—that gives you a real opportunity to look at your transportation networks and shift the energy profile in a way that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and is more real to the technology that advances. So it’s particularly for trains and locomotives. Anything with a combustion engine is actually pretty simple to shift over to green hydrogen with very minimal investment, as opposed to electrification.

When you look at long haul trucking as kind of a model, the joke that we hear in Sacramento all the time is that the battery is so heavy right now, the only thing that you’d be long haul trucking is Lay’s Potato Chips. So we’re trying to make sure that we recognize the urgency of climate change and provide other alternatives, especially in the transportation space, which accounts for about 60% of our greenhouse gas emissions.

QUESTION: Questioner Jeanne Fernandes, a member of the local high school board (WSCUHSD), noted that a school district in Del Norte got a grant to get electric school buses. “They cannot use them because they have too many hills, and they won’t go up the hills. They’re just sitting, so it was a huge waste.”

We hear that actually from folks all the time that they haven’t been able to develop the infrastructure to be able to support it. PG&E hasn’t been able to turn on the power for a lot of these folks trying to electrify.

We were very lucky. In Santa Rosa, we electrified half of our bus fleet and were able to put in that infrastructure as well, but we were kind of ahead of the curve. Santa Rosa is flat. We were able to do the modeling easier.

But then the other one that I hear, particularly from our district with all of its rural corners, is oftentimes these programs that fund the electric buses have a requirement of a one-to-one replacement. They already don’t have enough busses to begin with. And yes, the health impact is way better for kids on an electric bus than it is on a combustion bus, for sure, but getting some flexibility for them to be able to utilize both, especially in these areas where they have to drive really far and the battery can’t actually hold up for the day.

QUESTION: Totally different subject. What’s your feeling about redistricting?

I knew I was gonna get that question. So I’ll tell you what I know. I did a call with my colleagues yesterday to really piece through where it sits right now.

For folks who have been following the governor for a long time, one thing that you’ll probably have noticed is that he likes to make announcements. He doesn’t always talk to his partners [in the legislature] when he does it. So we were driving back on Friday, and we were hearing more and more about what the governor was saying. These have been discussions that have been ongoing, but he announced it as though it was a done deal.

So here’s where it sits: Right now, Texas has produced new maps for a very rare midterm redistricting. The way that it typically works is every 10 years you have the new census that allows you to draw new district lines. In California, we have an Independent Redistricting Committee that looks at the data and draws lines—80 assembly districts, 40 senate districts, and then the congressional districts—based on a number of criteria that includes things like population, like taking care of historically disenfranchised communities, trying to the extent that they can to keep counties and cities whole, having continuity and trying to be compact. Those are the requirements that they use. All of this is kind of shrouded in the California Voting Rights Act, where it looks at particularly for Latino communities that have historically not been drawn in a way that allows Latino representation. We just saw this in Santa Rosa when we redistricted and had Roseland for folks to be able to serve. That’s California.

Given that there’s only a three-Republican advantage in Congress, the president is pushing red states to do an early redistricting—because most other states have now been given the green light from the Supreme Court to do partisan redistricting—to remove Democratic districts.

Historically, in this country, the midterm elections, when a president gets elected two years later, historically, there is a backlash that exists, and usually the party that is not in the White House picks up seats. All of the projections right now are showing that Democrats should pick up enough seats next year to be able to hold the President accountable. Right now, there’s no backstop. Congress has completely abdicated their authority, their oversight of the President to the President. So the President’s plan is to get red states to redistrict to remove Democrats, so that that three number ends up becoming 8 or 12.

Texas has been the most vocal. They’re the furthest along in the process. They actually have a map where they have removed every single Democrat, just statistically, making it very challenging.

I will say, as a quick note, when you redistrict and you gerrymander the way that they are suggesting, it is a bit of a risk because you take the safe Republican seats and you make them less safe, and there’s no guarantee that you won’t have a backlash, especially because Texas actually has more registered Democrats than Republicans. So if you can get a turnout, it could be an issue.

So Governor Newsom announced that California would fight fire with fire: that if Texas takes away five Democratic districts, we would turn around and take five Republican districts to keep balance. His argument is that they are systematically disenfranchising voters at the national level and we shouldn’t, with one arm tied behind our back, try to defend ourselves. You now have four red states that are in the process of changing their districts. So it’s not just Texas.

So that all culminates with the Governor announcing that he is interested in the legislature looking at putting on the ballot on November 4 a special election where we will have new maps that counteract what Texas is doing and asks voters, ‘Which do you want to do? Do you want to keep the districts that we currently have, or do you want to fight fire with fire and redistrict ahead of this next election to counteract what Texas and other states are doing?’ That hasn’t happened yet, but presumably that’s what he’s going to ask us to do when we get back to Sacramento.

The discussion to really hone in on is that there is at least a pushback or an acknowledgement from legislators that if we were to do this, a couple things need to happen: one is that the districts need to continue to advance the priorities of making sure that marginalized communities are represented, that you can’t disenfranchise folks in order to fight the White House; you have to be able to do both at the same time to continue that priority and defend democracy.

The other is, I think that California needs to be a very strong voice for a U.S. constitutional amendment eliminating all gerrymandering. (Applause) To say what is in the best interest of democracy and representative government is to eliminate gerrymandering. We need to get back to the point where that’s the norm. But if we allow everybody else to gerrymander and disenfranchise California, we’ll never actually get to that point. But I think that it has to be coupled with that moral high point as well and make sure that we reaffirm the Independent Redistricting Commission’s role, not eliminate them entirely.

Read Part 2 of this article.

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