West Coast, Messed Coast™: Welcome to the Dumb Idea Factory!

Greetings West Coast, Messed Coast™ readers, and “Welcome to the Dumb Idea Factory!” This is a compendium of some worst ideas coming from the California, Oregon, and Washington state legislatures this silly season. Indeed, it is the best argument for part-time legislatures if ever there was one.

Bored with their constitutionally-tethered jobs: public safety, natural resources, water, lights, prisons, highways, law and order, and higher education, etc.; the state legislators on the West Coast, Messed Coast™ are working days and nights (unlike the DOJ), finding new ways to burrow into areas of your life where they are not wanted.

California currently is the only one of the three West Coast, Messed Coast™ states with a full-time legislature, but the others have been moving in that direction for a very long time thinking that somehow the poor citizenry couldn’t possibly survive without their benevolent dictates. Your West Coast, Messed Coast™ correspondent begs to differ. Bring back citizen legislatures!

While shortening the sessions of West Coast, Messed Coast™ legislatures is a must, so is clawing back the ceded power of state agencies in making rules that have the force of law.

Hiding the sausage-making at the dumb idea factory

We start at the northwest corner of the country in Washington State. Democrats in Olympia are using the people’s power and money to hide their chicanery from the voters. Literally.

Legislative leaders (Democrats) are once again using their raw power to illegally exclude themselves from public records laws. Each time this issue has been litigated (using the people’s money), efforts to hide documents and records have been slapped down by the courts, including the state Supreme Court.

But lawmakers do it anyway.

To wit, powerful legislators have now begun heavily redacting documents using “legislative privilege” as an excuse. “Where is this “legislative privilege” in the law?” asks the Seattle Times. “Nowhere.”

Crosscut reports:

Early last month, McClatchy broke the story that lawmakers had been releasing redacted and blacked-out documents when responding to records requests, even though a 2019 state Supreme Court ruling declared lawmakers subject to the Public Records Act.

Since then, several lawmakers told Crosscut they didn’t authorize the redaction of records that were only partially released. House and Senate officials have said separately that they revised their internal policies in the face of questions about the requests.

So not only do they burrow into the business of Washingtonians and ignore their public safety jobs, as when they contrived deliberately opaque plans to put the worst sex predators in low-security homes in near neighborhoods, but now they also want to hide the plans altogether.

It was only after the neighbors got a whiff of the plans that were they able to — at least at the time of this writing — stop them.

Washington state Democrats claim they were right to want to release top-tier sexual predators to neighborhoods to save the taxpayers money. As if. The Washington state budget — that we know of (see the first item) — is expected to be $70 billion.

And it’s not enough that the state has announced plans to become an abortion sanctuary after the overturning of the Roe and Casey decisions, but they want to conscript all the hospitals and insurance companies to pay for them.

In Senate Bill 5242, a plan that offers “maternity care or services… must also provide a covered person with substantially equivalent coverage to permit the abortion of a pregnancy.” And under the bill “a health carrier may not impose cost-sharing for abortion of a pregnancy.”

WA Senate passes SB 5242 – prohibiting abortion cost sharing. Because taxpayers should have to pay for their pro abortion agenda, of course.

The bill moves to the House where we will continue to fight it. pic.twitter.com/Zba00LvMmF

— Julie Barrett (@juliecbarrett) February 28, 2023

Minority Report Commission

I’ve previously reported that the Washington State Legislature is proposing House Bill 1333 “to establish a new commission, made up of racial groups, the FBI, state lawmakers, the ACLU, and the Anti-Defamation League, to pass judgment on the ideas of people, which they perceive to be disinformation and misinformation. Washington State’s far-Left Attorney General Bob Ferguson would oversee the proposed commission.” Read about it here at PJ Media.

Oregon’s homeless industrial complex expands

Meandering south, our West Coast, Messed Coast™ tour stops for a moment at what used to be a bustling section of North Portland, Ore., along the Columbia River called Hayden Island. Now it’s a hellscape of drug-addled tent dwellers. Even Walmart has said “no mas” and announced it will close its store there. Indeed, it’s closing its other store in the city limits. It has other stores nearby, but none is within the reach of the vapid Portland City Commissioners and their fearless Mayor Ted Wheeler.

And why is it that people and stores are fleeing for safer environs? Oregon Democrats’ response to the fentanyl crisis on the streets of Portland is not to blame their limp response and failure to enforce the law and basic sanitation. The “new” answer is to pay druggies for their homelessness by underwriting their drug purchases.

Senate Bill 603, which is being considered this legislative session, provides what is fundamentally a universal basic income scheme to keep drug-addicted tent dwellers drug-addled.

Establishes People’s Housing Assistance Fund Demonstration Program, administered by Department of Human Services, to provide 12 monthly payments of $1,000 to individuals who are experiencing homelessness, are at risk of homelessness, are severely rent burdened or earn at or below 60 percent of area median income. Sunsets January 2, 2026.

It expands government programs and gives spiffs to their favorite academics to “study” the matter and come up with ways to pay these “homeless” in perpetuity. This is otherwise known as Portland’s continuous feedback loop.

This is gonna work out great. Just ask the lady in a previous West Coast, Messed Coast™ update who says that government is “loving [them] to death.”

“It’s a piece of cake…you get three meals a day and don’t have to do sh*t…wake up, eat get high, wake up eat get high” repeat. A homeless woman shared with me why it’s so easy to be homeless. She was brutally honest because she hates the enablement .“They are loving us to death.”

According to a homeless woman in Portland, Oregon, Americans have NO INCENTIVE to join the workforce in Democratic-run cities: “It’s a piece of cake…you get three meals a day and don’t have to do anything…wake up, eat, get high, repeat." Take a listen:pic.twitter.com/uqR5e1bT5s

— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) January 6, 2023

The dumbest of all dumb ideas

House Bill 3206 would allow 16- and-17-year-olds to vote in school board elections. This is a step toward influencing impressionable teenagers to vote the values of their classroom teacher unionistas and Antifa-istas.

As the Capital Chronicle reports, this isn’t the only bill to get the youth vote to cancel out the bright red eastern Oregon voters.

Other bills this session aim to lower the state’s voting age in various capacities, including House Joint Resolution 20, which proposes an amendment to the Oregon constitution to lower the state’s voting age from 18 to 16.

If you think Oregon’s leadership is devoid of maturity now, just wait till the kids get to vote.

California dreaming nightmare

In California, a fiscal bomb cyclone is hitting as predicted, and business owners and the investment class are bailing out because lawmakers are so inept that “it’s impossible to stay here,” as Kevin Rabois put it. Rabois, an investor and former executive with Stripe, Square, PayPal, LinkedIn, and Yelp, moved to Florida. Those who haven’t followed Elon and others to Texas and Tennessee and have the means live in Nevada and jet to work in California, as noted in a recent episode of the Bravo TV show Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles. This season they’re selling Nevada real estate to Californians.

And the woman who oversaw the theft of billions in California COVID-19 funds is now being considered for a top spot in the Biden Administration.

There’s nothing like failing up, is there?

Speak trans, or we’ll take the kid

There’s much to hate about California’s full-time legislature and it usually has something to do with anything San Francisco state Sen. Scott Weiner (D-11th district) is pushing.

The California Family Council has listed its list of the worst bills of the session. It’s nothing short of awful, evil, and divisive.

The bills are an assault on free speech, families, and parenthood for starters.

AB-957, coauthored by Wiener of course, proposes that parents who don’t want to call their child their newly made-up trans name could lose custody of their child. That’s right, “deadnaming” your own child, whom you named, is an offense worthy of losing custody over.

This bill would require the court to strongly consider that affirming the minor’s gender identity is in the best interest of the child if a nonconsenting parent objects to a name and gender marker change to affirm the minor’s gender identity.

AB-655 allows your children to “consent” to have “counseling” without parental consent. Imagine the future legislative sessions playing with whatever else these ghouls want your child to give “consent” to.

AB-315 allows lawsuits against only “pro-life pregnancy centers” because they engage in false advertising.

Another bill seeks to further muddle what it is a person is killing when they have an abortion. SB-345 replaces the term “unborn child” in state law with “fetus.” Nancy Pearcey writes in her book Love Thy Body that legislatures and courts work overtime to separate our physical body from what the state defines as personhood. I wrote about this at PJ Media and talked with her about it on my Adult in the Room Podcast if you want to do a deeper dive.

And in a naked attack on the rights of parents to have a say in what materials are offered in schools, the council writes that “AB-1078: Prevents Local Control of Books/Curriculum in Public Schools.” The bill removes “a requirement that the local educational agency receive approval from the state board before removing any instructional materials or ceasing to teach any curriculum.” These are the same people who claim to be in support of “democracy.”

Finally, it appears these losers will do anything to suck the fun out of life.

In Laguna Beach, the sale, distribution, and public use of — drugs? No. Balloons will be banished because of global warming or something.

Party’s over for the classic decoration as Laguna prohibits its sale, distribution, and public use in an effort to protect the coast and prevent wildfires. https://t.co/ZOnNSdxKrD

— Voice of OC (@VoiceofOC) March 2, 2023

Next week it will be the West Coast, Messed Coast™ gun grabber update. Cowboy up.