Assembly Banking and Finance Committee, Monday, April 6, 2026

6 April 2026

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Assembly Banking and Finance Committee Mo., 6. Apr. 2026 California State Assembly

Ihren Sitzungen folgen

34:49 - 34:57

Redner 1

Good afternoon. The committee on banking and finance is called to order. Sergeants, please call the absent members.

35:04 - 35:05

Redner 2

It should work. Yeah.

35:05 - 35:43

Redner 1

It should work. Yeah. It's on. Thank you. Since we don't have a quorum, we will start as a subcommittee.

And in order to ensure that members are here to vote, we will start with the one presentation that we have today from assembly member Rogers. Please, join us here at the desk. File item 2AB1984. And, again, this will be heard as testimony only. Author, when you are ready, please start.

35:43 - 39:32

Redner 3

Yeah. Absolutely. So first of all, I'm here today to present a b nineteen eighty four. This bill really is our attempt to try to neuter the impacts from Citizens United. Citizens United was passed sixteen years ago, and since then, we've seen an unlimited amount of spending that is being spent in our democracy, and it has had a detrimental effect.

This bill actually approaches the problem from a different perspective than the question about how much speech and whether or not you should limit speech, and instead looks at the powers that are being granted to corporations and to LLCs, nonprofits, unions, to say that we just fundamentally think that there should be less money in politics. This isn't about saying one side's money or the other side's money is better or that it is worse. It's about saying that money by itself is inherently corrupting and that the public deserves a better process. I'll turn it over to folks in a minute here to talk a little bit about the how and and what this currently looks like, but I think it's really important for us to talk about the why. Since Citizens United passed, polling has consistently shown that the public does not trust the decisions that are made when so much money is being spent in the elections.

Nearly 80% of Americans feel like unfettered spending in elections has eroded democracy and actually is producing worse outcomes for us. We even have academic research that has shown that since Citizens United, the public not just feels like, but you can actually draw a line between the decisions that are made being more in tune with the wants and desires of the folks who are big dollar donors than it is with the average person. I like to quote George Carlin, and this is probably the only appropriate time ever to quote George Carlin in the legislature. But but George Carlin said, it's a big club, and you're not in it. And I think now more than ever, the electorate is feeling like it's a big club that they're not a part of.

Even if we wanna step back from where we sit with elections, when you see things like the Epstein files where the public sees zero accountability for people who are considered elites that are in those files. When you see billions of dollars being spent on stocks right before tweets happen, and there's somebody who's making a ton of money while the rest of us are toiling away and struggling to live in this country, it feels like a big club that the average person is not in. And we spend so much time fighting to get people to vote and make them believe that one one person, one vote, and one voice matters in this country, and our democracy really only works and functions when people believe that democracy works and that things are even. And with Citizens United and the spending that's been been occurring, especially since then, people don't actually believe that anymore. People don't actually believe that their voice matters, and they are completely drowned out by big moneyed interests.

So that's why we introduced the bill. Montana is advancing a ballot measure this November, a bipartisan measure that doesn't call out one specific type of money, but really just calls out money in general. And I think that in this moment, if Montana can do it, California should be having this discussion as well about how we return power back to people and make sure that they see that those who are in power recognize that there's a problem, and it's a system that we all have benefited. We're all in elected office. We all, in some way, have benefited from this system.

But I think it's important for us to say that we recognize that the system is broken and that we're trying to do something inherently different. So I

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