Tim Donnelly: Top 10 Stupidest New Laws in California for 2019
New Year’s Day—It’s that time of year when we spend a lot of time reflecting and I usually opine on the 10 Stupidest Laws that California has passed.
And I’ll admit that with Democrats firmly in control in California, it’s a much easier task to find 10 really, really bad laws in our modern-day version of Sodom and Gomorrah than it was for Lot to find 10 moderately good men in his day.
California’s gone from the ‘Golden State’ to the ‘Nanny State’ on steroids.
This law bans restaurants statewide from giving out single- use straws unless requested by customers. It only applies to full-service dining establishments but exempts fast food restaurants. Restaurants violating the law could be fined $25 daily for violations, or a maximum of $300 per year.
Seriously? First they banned single-use plastic bags—you remember the really useful ones—and now ‘single-use’ straws.
What’s next? Single use rubbers?
Exempting fast-food purveyors—where the vast majority of straws are handed out—makes this entire misguided effort look pointless. Guess the author lacked the balls to go all the way or got bribed by the likes of McDonalds, Burger King, et all.
1) AB1884: Plastic Straw Ban
2) SB1192 No Coke for Kids Act
Another stupid, pointless mandate that interferes needlessly between a parent and their child. It should be up to the parent, not the state to determine what a child eats or drinks. This law bans soda from being served with meals in restaurants that come with a drink forcing the restaurant to provide a “healthy” (think how Michelle Obama ruined school lunches forever and gave the term ‘healthy’ a bad name) beverage as the drink default option, such as milk, water, sparkling water or flavored water with no added natural or artificial sweeteners.
California is hell bent on turning children into robots, where every choice is programmed rather than chosen.
Personal responsibility—the building block of freedom—is an anathema to Democrats for whom government is the solution to every problem.
3) AB3219 The Citizen Disarmament Act of 2019
This law prohibits anyone convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence offense after January 1, 2019 from possessing a firearm for the rest of their lives.
Yes, you read that right—lifetime ban from owning a gun if you get convicted for a misdemeanor that results from a heated he-said, she-said situation. What’s next? Your guns confiscated during divorce proceedings based on your ex’s testimony?
4) AB2103 CCW Permit Training Training Tax
Another requirement on law-abiding gun owners forces gun owners with a concealed carry license to pay for and undergo a minimum of eight hours of training, and demonstrate proficiency and safety on the shooting range.
Requiring training in order to get a CCW is another way to make it harder and more expensive to obtain one. It’s nothing more than a tax on your God-given right to keep and more importantly, bear arms.
5) SB1100 Long Gun Age Discrimination Act
This law bans anyone younger than 21 from buying a long gun, such as a rifle or shotgun, from a licensed firearms dealer. This is just another attempt by the left to disarm Californians by taking a shot at our youth. Ostensibly inspired by recent tragic Florida school shooting, banning the legal purchase of any type of firearm will not result in fewer mass shootings in so-called ‘gun-free zones.’
Anyone hell-bent on committing mass murder will find a way to get their hands on a gun—legally or illegally.
This is discrimination. That’s all. They’re old enough to vote, and be drafted, but they can’t drink or own a rifle. It’s just un-American!
6) SB 1200: The ‘Minority Report’ Gun Confiscation Act Part II
This law adds magazines and ammunition to the list of items that can be ‘temporarily confiscated’ with a gun violence restraining order. “Bump stocks,” the rapid-fire device used in the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas, are now explicitly banned in California because of Senate Bill 1346. SB1200 also eliminates fees to file one of these ‘Gun
Violence Restraining Acts’ against your annoying neighbor, or your ex, or a family member you don’t like.
The key word about this law and the original ‘GVRO’ act inspired by the ‘Hunger Games’ killer, is that the government can take your legally acquired guns, ammo and magazines without due process. That’s a blatant unconstitutional taking. The burden falls on you to prove to the government that you don’t pose a danger to the public and should have your weapons returned. Good luck with that. We all know how that story is gonna end.
7) SB946 Illegal Alien Statewide Street Vendor Protection Act
This is another bill to protect the activity of illegal alien street vendors in the state by denying local ordinances that ban street vendors. This is another assault on local control designed to turn our communities into Third World cesspools.
Rather than clean up the streets and require all street vendors to abide by all the same laws that brick and mortar food service businesses (aka restaurants) must abide, California Democrats overrode local regulations where each community decided for itself—and mandated that these questionable businesses have a ‘right’ to work the streets. Mind you most are illegal ‘cash only’ businesses that pay no taxes to support the clean up of the streets they litter.
8) AB216 The Illegal Alien Voter-Fraud Enablement Act
Under the guise of making the vote by mail process easier and more accessible, this law requires taxpayers to pay for the postage of all mail ballots. It’s bad enough the Democrats have rigged the entire system to enable and even encourage voter fraud, but now they want to stick you with the bill for all those ballots mailed back by illegal aliens and dead people, which still count as long as they’re received up to 3 days after the election.
The ‘vote harvesting’ schemes dreamed up by Democrat consultants, whereby they door-knock and collect ballots without any supervision or control, and hand carry them into polling places on election day cost the Republicans almost every seat in California.
When you automatically send out mail ballots to everyone with a drivers license, right after granting DL’s to millions of illegal aliens, what do you think’s gonna happen?
9) AB 1066 The Illegal Alien Overtime Act
Democrats and establishment Republicans who hate the wall and the enforcement of immigration law it represents, always tell us that without illegal aliens, all our produce will rot in the fields. This new law will expand overtime pay rules to farms so that people who in most cases have no legal right to work here, will get time and a half for the work they’re not authorized to do. One more brick in the wall…wait, wrong metaphor. One more line between legal and illegal erased.
It’s not your business, you didn’t build it…
10) SB 826 Glass Ceiling Affirmative-Action Act
This law compels public companies in California to have at least one female director on their boards by the end of the year. Now, it will no longer be an accomplishment for a woman to be invited to serve on a corporate board because the affirmative-action-obsessed Democrats in California just made it a requirement to have at least one woman on the board.
It’s funny, the left is so obsessed with ‘mandating equality’ for the so-called ‘weaker sex’ while leading the fight against the only two genders God ever made, that they never see the contradiction in terms.
My prediction?
Expect next year’s list to have more mandates to ‘protect’ the rights of any one or all of the 57 genders California leftists have invented.
What’s missing?
There’s one new law that is glaring in it’s absence. In the aftermath of SB54, which made California a ‘Sanctuary State’ for illegal alien criminals, law enforcement has been banned from contacting ICE for the vast majority of criminals, including the illegal alien gang banger from Mexico who killed Newman, CA Police Corporal Ronil Singh—made doubly tragic by the fact that Singh was a legal immigrant.
We need a new law to make it a life sentence to aid and abet an illegal alien or a terrorist before or after their murderous rampage.
Is it just me or have you noticed the complete lack of any curiosity on the part of the #FakeNewsMedia about how this latest illegal alien cop-killer was able to get his hands on a gun in the most gun-controlled state in the union?
I haven’t ranked the horrible new laws in any sort of order, so feel free to comment on which you think is the worst, or what egregious laws I missed.
There’s not much chance of Democrat priorities changing anytime soon: they put illegal aliens and criminals first at the expense of law-abiding American citizens and sworn law enforcement.
Godspeed,
Tim Donnelly is a Former California State Assemblyman.
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/tim.donnelly.372/ Twitter: @PatriotNotPol
