I find it wild that it had to be reversed in the first place, but I’m proud of the Californians who applied pressure to reverse this decision. Personally, I think people need to seriously reevaluate the person who represents them if they only vote along party lines, even if it’s to the detriment of their own constituents
Interesting. I’m always suspicious of new laws meant to protect minors because it seems like children are always used as an excuse to promote bigotry. Not always of course, but that has been the recent trend. It seems this bill passed the Senate unanimously and was killed in an assembly committee. Newsom personally backed it and got it back on track. That probably says more about the political and optics of voting down a “tough on crime” trafficking bill than it does the actual policy.
It sounds to me like the concern is victims of trafficking getting forced into helping with recruiting. I don’t know much about this stuff, but I remember that was one of the ways Epstein worked - victimize one girl, then coerce her to bring a friend next time. Sick shit, but the concern is do we treat that first victim the same as we would treat Epstein? Do we allow prosecutors to use the threat of a life in prison to coerce victims to testify if they otherwise wouldn’t want to?
So, is this a case of a Republican legislator successfully backing Democrats into a corner optically, such that if they vote no Democrats get labeled as supporting child trafficking, while at the same time the law would work to turn victims of trafficking into criminals, to the potential detriment of victims? Or are some Democrats overly worried about edge cases? I don’t know, this shit is complicated, and this is why policy shouldn’t be reduced to headlines and talking points.