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Comment by masonic | Hacker News Reader

Favorite quote:

  Complicating matters, PG&E employs (new bill author Assemblymember) Quirk’s son.

Witness the magic that is CA Democrats' "gut and amend" process for yourselves (red type is the original bill contents):

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVersionsCompareC...

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So this was a bill about plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and they just re-wrote the whole thing to be about wildfires? What's the point?

I'm assuming it's a bargaining chip that lawmakers can use. E.g., it you vote for this thing I care about, you can rewrite my bill (that probably wasn't going anywhere anyways) for your own ends. Maybe someone with more insight in to state politics could weigh in...

Right. But why not just make it a different bill?

If you’re looking for fast legislation, you have to ‘gut’ an existing bill because the CA constitution requires a 30 day wait after you introduce a bill (with an exception for budget bills).

  CA constitution requires a 30 day wait

Where do you see that in the CA Constitution?

Either house can have rules about that, but such rules are routinely waived by the Democrat leadership.

One point of the strategy is that the murdered bill number already traversed one or more required committees that the bill rewriter wants to avoid.

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