Efforts to address sexual misconduct face headwinds

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There’s something about reaching the halfway mark of the summer recess that has me thinking back to summer break in school, when teachers and parents would start gently reminding you about those reading lists and other to-do items, signaling reality was, unfortunately, on the horizon. 

Several people I’ve spoken to this week appear to be in that same mind-set shift — scheduling return-to-session meetings and thinking about what legislative priorities they’ll need to jump back into once members journey back to Sacramento. 

As ever, there’s a heap of bills to pick back up, and we’re sorting through that list to find the standouts. 

Have any thoughts? Email me at [email protected] to share any of the bills and conversations you’re betting will lead in the Legislature the first week of August.

Over the past few months, several high-ranking lawmakers across several states have fallen from grace after facing serious accusations of sexual misconduct, including sexual abuse. 

Here in California, the former East Bay congressman and governor’s race frontrunner Eric Swalwell ended his campaign and resigned his seat days after the Chronicle reported that a former staffer said he had sexually assaulted her. 

In the months since Swalwell’s April departure from public office, politicians’ sexual misconduct has remained a persistent and fraught issue among voters and in public discourse. Just last week, Maine’s Graham Platner ended his campaign for the U.S. Senate days after Politico reported that a former girlfriend accused him of rape. Both Swalwell and Platner have denied wrongdoing.

As the Chronicle’s Sophia Bollag reported this week, condemnations of individual men and calls for them to step down, like in Swalwell and Platner’s cases, have been swift. But broader efforts to root out sexual misconduct in political institutions – including in the California Legislature — have not been as straightforward. 

Late last month, two bills in the Legislature designed to crack down on misconduct faced significant headwinds, Bollag wrote. 

One, AB2753, would have banned people on the sex offender registry from running for office. The bill, introduced by Assembly Member Esmeralda Soria, D-Fresno, was killed in the Senate Elections Committee.

The other is AB2691, from Assembly Member Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, which would bar people convicted of felony sexual assault from running for office. It is still alive but was narrowed to exclude some crimes against children, which has sparked a massive conservative backlash.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the corresponding “We Said Enough” movement at the California Capitol, California lawmakers passed a series of bills cracking down on misconduct and created a new process for reporting misconduct within the Legislature. 

But they resisted calls to codify the process in law, Bollag reported. In the first few years of the new policy, the Legislature would regularly release reports on substantiated misconduct complaints for lawmakers and senior staffers, but that activity has slowed to a trickle in recent years. Since 2020, the Chronicle found only one report has been released. 

Soria’s now-dead bill, AB2753, kicked up a flurry of attention and pushback the last week of session before summer recess. 

In the Senate Elections Committee, chair, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, sharply criticized the bill, arguing it would unfairly punish people convicted of low-level offenses historically used to target gay people, like having consensual sex in a car. 

Wiener said during the committee hearing he supported the intent of the bill, to crack down on misconduct in politics, but that he was skeptical people convicted of serious sex crimes would be able to win elections in the first place. He also noted that he has long advocated for reform of the sex offender registry, which he argues has strayed from its original intent.

“It is a tool for law enforcement to be able to monitor people who may potentially cause a risk,” Wiener said. “When we use the sex offender registry as a proxy for anything else, we get into problems.”

The other bill, AB2691, which advanced out of the Senate Elections Committee the same day as Soria’s bill died, did so with significant amendments. 

The changes narrow it to exclude some crimes specifically involving minors. Addis told KCRA she agreed to the changes over concerns it could apply to what are sometimes called “Romeo and Juliet” relationships, where two young people are in a consensual but technically illegal relationship because one is under 18 and the other is over. But some conservative groups harshly criticized the amendments, saying they protect child predators. 

Despite the narrowing, Addis pointed out that the measure would still be the first of its kind in the country. It advanced out of the Senate Elections Committee with all Democrats on the committee, including Wiener, voting for it. It would need to pass the full Senate and Assembly by the end of August and be signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to become law.

Newsom signed a handful of bills on Monday, including a DMV overhaul that includes use of a data-sharing tool progressive and immigrant rights groups have decried. 

SB169, touted by the governor as a “modernization” of the department, contains a collection of new programs and streamlining procedures, including the integration of artificial intelligence. For average Californians, the most impactful element is likely the expansion of the state’s new digital ID program, allowing up to 60% of licensed drivers to participate in the pilot program.

The most contentious element of the DMV reforms pertains to the state’s inclusion in a national data-sharing program used to confirm whether individuals applying for a REAL ID already have one in another state, ensuring only one valid license per person. 

A group of more than 100 nonprofit organizations and activist groups, many advocating for immigrant and undocumented rights, signed a letter objecting to California’s participation in the program in May. They claimed it could expose data of immigrants to “potential abuse,” when that information crossed state protections and was made accessible by other states. 

It would not be the first time DMV-related reforms opened immigrants up to immigration enforcement action: After California passed a 2013 law allowing immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, ICE officers were able to access the information they’d provided the DMV and use it to arrest them.

The pushback sent lawmakers to the negotiating table, ending up with the addition of tighter restrictions on what kind of data could be shared in the “State-to-State” program. That includes a prohibition on sharing sensitive data like a person’s undocumented status, their address, photograph, and gender. 

The bill signed Monday specifies the data shared is “for the sole purpose of verifying and exchanging driver’s license, identification card, and driver history records.” 

Recall the buzz around the department’s revocation of 11,000 driver’s licenses they said had “irregularities” last week? 

A statement to the Chronicle on Monday made clear that at least some of those are due to suspected cheating. A spokesperson for the department said several cases had been referred to local law enforcement for possible prosecution, but offered no additional details on the number of cases.

But the way the department went about notifying thousands of drivers left a bad taste in the mouths of the Senate Transportation Committee’s two highest-ranking members. 

State Sens. Tony Strickland, R-Huntington Beach, and Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, sent letters demanding more information from the DMV last week. They both raised concerns that the letters sent to Californians instructing them to retake their driver’s tests implied they cheated, without providing further explanation.

“This letter that went out is unacceptable,” Strickland said on Tuesday, referring to the notices sent out to the thousands of affected Californians. The committee’s vice-chair said that the DMV’s demand that notified test-takers return to their local field office to re-take their knowledge exam within 30 days is a “major disruption,” and offered people next to no reason as to why. 

Strickland considers it a bipartisan issue centered on the agency’s lack of transparency. 

“We need to make sure that they are efficient, that they are transparent and accountable,” he said.

The DMV has been the subject of numerous scandals over the last decade, and was a massive project for Newsom at the beginning of his term when the department reached a tipping point in 2019. Californians reported hours-long waiting lines and state auditors described the DMV as struggling with a “reactive culture.” Many of those issues, which coincided with the roll-out of the REAL ID, have subsided, and Newsom has touted the agency’s revamp as a success. 

But problems have still cropped up. In December, the DMV notified more than 300,000 people across the state that a software error occurred in the issuing of their REAL IDs, and needed to take action to receive replacements. 

Questions? Thoughts? Interesting tidbits to share? Reach out at [email protected], and follow me on X, @KathrynPlmr.