The ballot measure repeals Proposition 8, which California voters approved in 2008 to define marriage as between a man and a woman in the state's constitution, stripping same-sex couples of the legal right to marry.
This was honestly not a great time to try to pass restorative justice legislation in CA. People are still pissed about the uptick in crime after the pandemic. Tough on crime stuff has been passing across the board in CA for about 2 years now. SF recalled its DA in 2022, and Oakland just did the same and recalls its mayor.
I would’ve tried to push for this bill at a later date. People are grumpy right now. This thing never stood a chance in 2024.
The Oakland mayor recall wasn’t related to crime. A rich fuck who owns coal mines wants to resume shipping coal through the port so he’s trying to intimidate politicians with money.
Yeah, Philip Dreyfuss, a coal hedge fund bro from Piedmont, bank rolled a lot of the recall efforts.
That said, all the of campaign messaging and mailers were about crime. That's the thread he pulled on to get people to vote for her recall. Dreyfuss' ground campaign wasn't about coal at all, he tried to bury that because Oakland hates that shit.
Well that’s because California is pro-prison and also because the simple arguments for prison labor are well known and arguments against it aren’t.
Most people don’t think about it beyond “they committed a crime and it costs money to keep them in there, therefore they should be helping to pay for that”. That’s about as deep as it goes.