How things actually work in the Capitol

The California Legislature is a waste of money and space.

Every year, the Legislature goes through the motions of passing laws through its regular process, appearing to be a deliberative body. Actually, it's a dead body. The real decisions are made in back rooms and regulatory agencies, where the public is excluded or ignored.

One aspect of this decayed process is on display in Sacramento right now. Gov.

Gavin Newsom recently announced a package of legislation to streamline infrastructure projects. “Streamline” is a word used in Sacramento when government officials want to override their own strangling mess of regulations and requirements, but only for certain people or projects, not for everything and everybody.

It's best understood as a fundraising technique. It's quite streamlined in that regard.

California's typical governing process works like this: the Legislature passes idiotic laws that set arbitrary targets and goals on arbitrary timelines, then hand them off to regulatory agencies to implement. The regulatory agencies go through a suffocatingly dense process of rulemaking to comply with the laws and try to reach the targets and goals, which may be infeasible and even irrational. At this point, elected lawmakers are out of the picture, or rather, posing for pictures, while regulated industries and affected individuals are left waiting in line to submit their public comments to regulatory agencies. These powerful agencies are headed by government appointees but run by a full-time staff that is invisible to the public and accountable to no one.

This is how California ends up with costly and sometimes insane requirements, bans, mandates, fees and deadlines that raise the price of everything you buy in this state: energy, water, food, housing, and all goods and services. What regulators have done to truckers in California should be prosecuted as a war crime.

Rather than admit openly that the idiotic laws are causing problems, the state government uses a backroom process to change the law, or even write entirely new laws, when no one is looking.

Every year, the state Senate and Assembly each pass a stack of blank bills — truly blank, with only a bill number and a single sentence stating that the bill is intended to relate to the budget. These blank bills are formally introduced, sent to a committee where they are “heard” and passed, and sent to the floor and passed, thereby meeting all the deadlines on the