Free Republic

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor in 2003, he promised to veto any bill that had not gone through the policy committees of the Senate and Assembly. This pledge, he said, was aimed at ending the practice of gut-and-amend bills – bills rewritten in the wee hours of the Legislature to avoid public scrutiny. "Bills are passed in a rush, in the middle of the night," Schwarzenegger said at the time. "There is no such thing as democracy in the dark." Schwarzenegger swept into office in 2003 because of such promises. Ever since, he has selectively gutted and amended...

SACRAMENTO – Despite a defeat in the Assembly and a likely veto from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, advocates of same-sex marriage plan to revive their legislation in the Senate. Yesterday, they began using a legislative technique known as "gut and amend" to replace the provisions of an Assembly bill that's already in the Senate with provisions from the defeated same-sex marriage bill. "I can continue the fight for a critically important civil rights issue," said Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, the author of the same-sex marriage bill. "Why would I not go forward?" Gay rights advocates hope that the more liberal...

SACRAMENTO — Facing a potentially narrow defeat in the Assembly, Bay Area and Los Angeles lawmakers used an eleventh-hour political maneuver late Wednesday to catapult their landmark doctor-assisted suicide bill into the Senate. The move, called a "gut and amend," which transfers the legislation into a Senate bill, bypassed a Friday deadline for passage out of the house of origin and keeps the measure alive. The proposal has triggered widespread, emotional debate, with major forces lining up on either side. In committee hearings and behind the scenes, the clash has grown for months to the point where numerous Assembly members...

Sacramento -- State Senate Democratic leader Don Perata and his Republican counterpart are quietly and urgently pushing a bill that critics say would torpedo a major investigation by election regulators into at least one sitting legislator's campaign finances. The bill, SB25, would make it harder for investigators to prove that a politician may have manipulated contributions to avoid new campaign donation limits. It would lessen the Fair Political Practices Commission's ability to use as evidence letters from political donors to candidates that accompany contribution checks. The so-called "transmittal letters" are said to make up a significant portion of the evidence...

Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh tried every trick in his political playbook to make California the first state in the nation to fine parents caught smoking in cars with small children present. When his bill was killed by fellow lawmakers in public hearings, he gutted an entirely different bill and filled the empty shell with his anti-smoking measure. When that bill failed, the Los Angeles Democrat gutted another one and did it again. "We've killed this bill two or three times already and he keeps pushing it. It's crazy. We've spoken on this issue," said Assemblyman Tony Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks, over the...

California students certainly won't find it in their civics textbooks. Nor will the subject surface in most conversations about the way legislation is enacted. That's because political insiders in Sacramento would just as soon keep quiet about the disturbingly common practice of gutting and amending a bill in order to slip it through at the very end of a legislative session. It works like this: A lawmaker or a special-interest group wants to pass a controversial measure but the deadline has passed for the introduction of new bills. So, supporters grab a dead or dormant proposal, strip the original language,...