Can California Democrats Kill Proposition 36?

On November 5, 2024, California voters overwhelmingly adopted Proposition 36, the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act, a modest reform to restore consequences for thieves and drug dealers and require treatment for addicts.  It’s adoption was a complete rebuke of Proposition 47, the so-called Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act adopted in 2014 with major funding from the ACLU and socialist billionaire George Soros. That measure decriminalized theft and drug crimes. It’s important to note that Proposition 47 was supported by then Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature. Ten years later, these same politicians opposed Proposition 36, although millions of democrats voted for it.

The problem that arises when voters adopt a ballot measure that the Governor and the controlling majority of the Legislature oppose is that the money to implement the measure must be appropriated by the Legislature and approved by the Governor. On January 10, 2025, Governor Newsom sent his 2025-2026 budget proposal to the Legislature. It included zero funds for additional county jail space or drug treatment programs needed to enforce Proposition 36. When a reporter asked the Governor about this he said, “We are absolutely committed to implementing the terms that were established by the voters.” At the same time he was telling this lie, Newsom was asking for a $3.4 billion loan to cover the state’s shortfall in funds for free medical care for illegal aliens.

This has happened in California before. In 1993 the democrat-controlled Legislature refused to adopt AB 971, the Three Strikes sentencing law to crack down on habitual felons. Months later 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped from her home in the sleepy town of Petaluma.  After two months of almost nightly worldwide coverage of her disappearance, police arrested habitual felon Richard Allen Davis, who led them to the little girl’s raped and murdered body. That tragedy sharpened the public’s focus on crime and propelled, Mike Reynolds, the father of a another girl murdered by an habitual felon, to qualify the Three Strikes initiative for the 1994 general election. In an attempt to head this off, the legislature scrambled to passed AB 971. But Reynolds went forward with the initiative, knowing that the Legislature could not repeal or amend a voter adopted ballot measure. It passed with 72% of the vote. One of the primary objectives of Three Strikes was to increase the number of repeat felons sent to prison and keep them there longer. This required the democrat-controlled legislature to approve funding for more prison space. The majority refused, and even with republican Governor Pete Wilson in office, no funding bill for additional prison beds reached his desk. The same held true under Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  As a result, the prisons became overcrowded and the ACLU filed lawsuits on behalf of inmates seeking court orders to reduce the “unconstitutional” prison overcrowding. In 2010 an activist three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit rewarded this effort, ordering the release of between 30,000 and 35,000 inmates. A year later the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that order on a 5-4 vote.

California’s one-party Legislature had blunted the enforcement of a law they did not like.

Now they are trying to do the same thing with Proposition 36.