Democrats Will Try Long-Shot Maneuver To Bring Back Unemployment Benefits

WASHINGTON -- Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives will try to restore long-term unemployment insurance to 2 million workers using a rare parliamentary maneuver on Wednesday.

The procedural move, called a discharge petition, requires a majority of House members to sign on in support of discharging a bill from committee that has otherwise stalled. Democrats were unable to hit the threshold needed -- 218 votes -- for another recent discharge petition on minimum wage legislation, so it's unlikely they'll succeed with unemployment benefits.
But Democrats hope merely raising the issue puts pressure on Republicans.

"If my colleagues want to vote against the extension, I respect their right to disagree; but failing to even allow a vote goes against the very progress that families and our constituents demand," said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), who will file the petition. "Partisan politics must not be allowed to get in the way of doing the right thing for our middle class families. That’s why I'll be filing a measure to end the gridlock and force a vote on extending unemployment insurance."

Discharge petitions are one of the few tools at the minority party's disposal to push the majority party to hold votes on items it doesn't want to advance. The majority party in the House, currently the Republicans, generally won't bring up a bill for a vote unless it has support from the majority of the chamber, or often the majority of the party's own members. 

That means that bills like the unemployment insurance measure from Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), which is currently going nowhere in the House Ways and Means Committee, don't make it to the floor to be either voted through or voted down.

Levin's legislation would reauthorize federal unemployment insurance until the end of the year. The benefits, which kick in for workers who use up six months of state compensation, lapsed at the end of December for 1.3 million workers. Since then another 700,000 workers have exhausted their state benefits and been left hanging. Under the legislation they would all receive lump-sum payments for benefits they've missed so far.

Nearly 4 million workers have been jobless six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The average jobless spell in February had lasted about nine months.

House Republican leaders have said they're not very interested in an unemployment insurance bill if it doesn't come with any GOP-friendly provisions. And they're happy to let the Democratic-controlled Senate make the first move, something the Senate has been unable to do.

"The Speaker has said repeatedly that if Senate Democrats can produce an extension of temporary emergency unemployment benefits that is not only paid-for, but also does something to actually create jobs, he will be happy to discuss it," Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in an email last week.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated reauthorizing the unemployment insurance would add 200,000 jobs to the economy, but Republicans have ignored or dismissed the CBO's findings on unemployment benefits and jobs.

In addition to the discharge petition Democrats filed last month to raise the minimum wage, they are expected to soon make the same move on comprehensive immigration reform.

Discharge petitions rarely get the 218 votes needed to force a vote on the House floor. Since 1931, when the maneuver took its current form, 563 discharge petitions have been filed but only 47 received 218 signatures, according to the Congressional Research Service. Over the past 30 years, seven petitions have made it to the signature threshold, and all of them received floor votes.

But even if they don't expect to get 218 signatures, proponents argue that circulating discharge petitions can up the pressure. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said as much last week when talking about plans to file a discharge petition for a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

"We'll never get the 218 on the [immigration] discharge petition ... because the Republicans will generally not sign," she said in an interview on SiriusXM. "But the fact that it is there and the outside mobilization is saying, 'All we want is a vote' -- either sign the petition, which enables us to get a vote, or urge the speaker to give us a vote."


PHOTO: On Wednesday March 12, 2014, Nancy Pelosi of California told reporters , she and dozens of her party members prepared to file a discharge petition in the House, aimed at forcing a House vote on an unemployment insurance extension. The Huffington Post/Jennifer Bendery


via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/11/unemployment-benefits_n_4936840.html?utm_hp_ref=unemployment

Californians' food assistance use doubled during recession

As recession gripped the state a half-decade ago, Californians receiving what used to be called food stamps more than doubled to more than four million, a legislative hearing was told Tuesday, but the state still has, relatively, a very low rate of utilization.

Californians' use of what is now called CalFresh may be the lowest in the nation, a report from the Legislature's budget analyst says.

The state's utilization rate of 57 percent of eligible low-income Californians was calculated by the federal government for 2011 and was tied with Wyoming for the lowest. The national average was 79 percent that year, indicating that were California to reach that level, another 1.4 million Californians would be receiving the electronic benefit cards that replaced food stamps and are used in grocery stores to purchase approved foods.

The report said that the food assistance program increased from two million persons in 2006-07 to more than four million in 2013-13 and showed an especially large jump — nearly 25 percent — in 2009-10, during the depths of the recession. While enrollment is still growing, the rate of increase has dropped to scarcely 5 percent a year as the economy has improved.

However, the report from Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor's office warned legislators that the federal data on utilization may be outdated and otherwise not a true picture of what's happening with the federally financed program in California, although it did not question that the state's use is below average.

The joint hearing by the Assembly and Senate human services committees was called to delve into ways to increase utilization. It heard from a variety of advocates for the poor, as well as state and local officials who administer the program.

PHOTO: Volunteers sort boxes of food at the Elk Grove Food Bank Services in Elk Grove on Feb. 20, 2014. The Sacramento Bee/Randall Benton

Citing truancy 'crisis,' Kamala Harris, lawmakers seek action

Emphasizing that young students who frequently miss school are far more likely to fall behind and commit crimes later in life, California Attorney General Kamala Harris and half a dozen lawmakers introduced an anti-truancy bill package on Monday.

The legislative effort ties to a a report from Harris' office that depicts the repercussions of an estimated one million truant elementary school students a year, good for a 29.6 percent truancy rate among California youngsters.

Missing a substantial amount of school carries cascading consequences, Harris said: children who are already behind reading level by third grade are four times as likely to drop out of high school. In turn, high school dropouts suffer higher unemployment rates and become more likely to turn to crime.

"There's a direct connection between education and public safety," Harris said.

School districts also incur an economic cost, Harris said, given that funding is linked to school attendance rates. The report estimated that absent students cost districts $1.4 billion annually.

Legislators promoted a set of five bills focused on data collection and reporting, from requiring the State Department of Education to track truancy rates to having district attorneys explain the outcomes of school attendance-related prosecution.

A bill by Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, would require all counties to create entities called school attendance review boards, which some counties already use to give chronically absent students an alternative to entering the juvenile justice system. A bill by Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, would have existing school attendance boards share more data.

Harris and lawmakers acknowledged that enhanced data collection will not by itself affect the outside issues that keep kids out of school, from poor health to volatile homes to overworked parents. But they said it is a starting point, allowing policymakers to understand why desks stay empty.

"If we don't know what the problem is or where the problem is, we can't solve it," said Buchanan.
Low-income students whose families lack the resources to compensate for missed classwork suffer acutely from skipping school, lawmakers said, as do children of color. Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, called addressing early childhood truancy key to breaking the cycle of poorly performing students churning through the criminal justice system.

"Stemming the tide of truancy is a critical component to disrupt the school to prison pipeline," Monning said.

PHOTO: Attorney General Kamala Harris greets Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson at a press conference at the Capitol on Monday March 10, 2014. The Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua 

Analyst says Jerry Brown's prison plan is short-term fix

Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to reduce prison overcrowding may satisfy a looming federal deadline but it does not represent a durable long-term solution, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.

In a victory for the Brown administration, the federal panel adjudicating the struggle over California's prison overcrowding recently gave the state two more years to reduce its population to constitutional levels.

While the LAO concludes that California is on pace to slip under the federal cap, the nonpartisan analyst faulted Brown's plan for relying too much on the use of county jails and private prisons. Brown's budget would spend $481 million to place just under 17,000 inmates in so-called contract beds .

A strategy combining contract beds with other changes, such as increasing good time credits and expanding parole for the elderly, inmates with serious medical conditions and second-strikers, will likely get California under a federally-mandated cap by the new 2016 deadline, the LAO found.

But the state's prison population is projected to climb again in subsequent years. Relying on contract beds will also place a costly burden on the state, the LAO argues, to the tune of about $500 million annually.

"The plan contains relatively few measures that would help the state maintain long-term compliance other than relying indefinitely on costly contract beds," the report concludes.

Given those risks, the LAO urged the Legislature to craft some longer-term policy solutions. 

Its recommendations include reducing certain sentences and converting some crimes to "wobblers" that can be charged either as misdemeanors or felonies -- an approach Brown vetoed last year - allowing inmates to earn more early release credits for good behavior, and expanding programs that allow adult men to serve part of their sentences outside of state prison.

The two-year extension, granted earlier this month, came after the governor secured legislative approval last year of his package allocating $315 million to house excess inmates.

But because California received the two-year extension, Brown's budget proposes taking some of the money approved last year to house more inmates and depositing it instead into a Recidivism Reduction Fund.

Specifically, Brown's budget also proposes channeling just under $50 million from the recidivism fund into re-entry hubs and around $30 million on substance abuse, rehabilitation and mental illness programs.

That infusion might help for the coming budget year, but it will quickly exhaust the recidivism fund, the LAO said. To sustain the types of programs Brown proposes funding, the Legislature would need to continue dipping into the General Fund on an annual basis.

"The Governor's budget proposals create or expand programs that would require ongoing funding to effectively reduce the prison population," the LAO report estimates.

The LAO also rejected both the governor's plan to fund re-entry hubs, which use education and treatment to prepare inmates nearing the end of their terms to reintegrate into society. 

The report cast doubt on whether re-entry hubs effectively reduce recidivism.
Similarly, the report urged the governor to discard his plan to spend $11.3 million on integrated drug treatment, calling the program unproven and overly costly.

Instead, the LAO recommends diverting the $60 million set aside for those two programs towards an initiative rewarding counties that keep paroled felons from returning to state prisons.


PHOTO: Inmates inside the jail cells in the old Stanislaus County downtown main jail in Modesto on Wednesday June 19, 2013.The Sacramento Bee/Manny Crisostomo.

Attorney General Kamala Harris fights for concealed-weapon standard

Attorney General Kamala Harris announced on Thursday she would appeal a ruling overturning California's concealed-weapons law.

Two weeks ago, a three-judge federal appeals court struck down a California law requiring people to demonstrate "good cause" - beyond self defense - before they can carry a concealed handgun in public.

As a result of that rule, some counties have a more stringent standard for obtaining permits, requiring applicants to justify a need beyond self-defense. A group of San Diego County residents had sued after their permit applications were rejected in 2009.

Harris had until Thursday to declare the state's legal response, and she announced in a press release that she had filed a motion urging the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its decision.

"Local law enforcement must be able to use their discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon," Harris said in a statement. "I will do everything possible to restore law enforcement's authority to protect public safety, and so today am calling on the court to review and reverse its decision."


San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore has already decided to not appeal the ruling.

California drought relief package heads to Gov. Jerry Brown

In a concerted effort to aid California's drought-stricken communities, the Legislature on Thursday sped a $687 million relief package to Gov. Jerry Brown.

One week after Brown and legislative leaders unveiled the emergency legislation, both houses of the Legislature approved the bill with little resistance. The Assembly passed the bill 65-0, and the Senate sent it to Brown's desk with only three dissenting votes.

Relying largely on unspent bond money, the measure sets aside more than $500 million to quench the thirst of afflicted communities with infrastructure projects like capturing storm water and distributing recycled water.

It also sets aside millions for drinking water in communities at risk of running out and allocates food and housing aid for Californians, like those in the agricultural industry, who have seen their livelihoods damaged by diminished water supplies.

In the Assembly, Republicans used the opportunity to call for more storage capacity, an issue being debated via a set of water bond proposals. But they agreed with their Democratic colleagues that the emergency water package marked a needed intermediate step.

"This is part of the puzzle, part of the solution for the entire state," said Assemblyman Rudy Salas, D-Bakersfield.

Things went a little less smoothly in the Senate, where the water debate occurred against the backdrop of Republicans seeking to expel a state senator who has been convicted on eight felony charges stemming from lying about his residence. Senate Democrats rebuffed that attempt, preserving a status quo that has seen Sen. Rod Wright, D-Inglewood, accept a paid leave of absence.

The drought bills passed the Senate handily in the end, though during floor debate Republicans accused Democrats of maneuvering the procedure to avoid a two-thirds vote. 

Democrats do not have a supermajority this week because Wright and Sen. Ron Calderon, indicted last week by a federal grand jury, are out dealing with legal problems.

Republicans argued that the bills should be urgency measures -- which require two-thirds approval -- instead of budget trailer bills that take a simple majority to pass. They also argued that taking up budget trailer bills several months after the budget was approved violates a voter-approved initiative that the Legislature cannot get paid if it doesn't complete the budget by June 15.

"This bill is just another example of how our budget process has been twisted over the years," said Sen.Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, one of three opposing votes.

Laurel Rosenhall of The Bee Capitol Bureau contributed to this report.
via: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2014/02/california-drought-relief-package-heads-to-gov-jerry-brown.html

Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2014/02/california-drought-relief-package-heads-to-gov-jerry-brown.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2014/02/california-drought-relief-package-heads-to-gov-jerry-brown.html#storylink=cpy

Come out to the Justice Reinvestment Committee Hearing Tomorrow!

Join Take Action California Members Time for Change Foundation, CURB and California Partnership at the Select Committee on Justice Reinvestment's Hearing tomorrow at the California Science Center in Los Angeles!

Committee Co-Chair Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer, Sr. is convening a hearing in Los Angeles. Come discuss local programming practices in Southern California which have promise toward reducing recidivism. The Select Committee will hear from law enforcement, courts and community service providers from a number of Southern California counties, including Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange.

Friday, February 28, 2014
10 am - 12 pm

California Science Center 

Loker Conference Room
700 Exposition Park Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90037

The Select Committee's goal is to develop real data-based, long-term solutions that preserve public safety without spending excessive money on prisons. We can focus more on investments that grow our economy and provide opportunity.