Inside One of the Capitol’s Most Secretive Processes

By EMILY HOEVEN

There wasn’t a lot of light on what state lawmakers got up to on Thursday—literally.

First, there was the power outage that swept across downtown Sacramento, delaying the start of the Assembly and Senate’s floor sessions.

But it would have been understandable if you were left in the dark even after the electricity was restored

That’s because lawmakers then embarked on an opaque process called the suspense file, a twice-annual procedure in which they rattle through a list of hundreds of bills at breakneck speed, passing or killing them without a word of explanation — and, in the cases of some dead bills, without even mentioning them at all.

Making it even harder to track what’s going on, the Assembly and Senate appropriations committees — which handle the suspense file — met at the same time Thursday, forcing advocates, reporters and curious members of the public to rapidly toggle back and forth between screens and spreadsheets.

And don’t for a second think you can get up and go to the bathroom, or go get another cup of coffee, or take your eyes off the screen — because you can’t rewind legislative livestreams.

Plus, you aren’t just tracking what lawmakers say — you’re tracking what they don’t.

While the Assembly appropriations committee announced which bills it was tabling — in other words, slaying — the Senate didn’t. So a proposal to shut down the three offshore oil rigs in state waters following last year’s Huntington Beach oil spill died a literally silent death, as did a bill to tighten gun safety requirements for film productions after Alec Baldwin accidentally fatally shot photographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the movie “Rust.”

State Sen. Dave Cortese, the Campbell Democrat who authored the gun safety bill: “It’s a powerful and ruthless industry. First the industry killed Halyna. Then they killed the bill that would’ve made people like her safe.”

Indeed, while the suspense file allows lawmakers to shelve proposals that are too expensive, it also allows them to silently euthanize those that are controversial, opposed by powerful interest groups, or politically inconvenient—concerns that take on additional weight in an election year.

All in all, about 220 bills met their demise Thursday — and Alexei Koseff and the rest of the CalMatters team have a rundown of the most notable measures.

Read Inside One of the Capitol’s Most Secretive Processes on CalMatters.