As my colleague Gabrielle Gurley notes today in her excellent interview with David Toscano, the former Democratic leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, state legislatures matter: They can be laboratories of democracy or, when controlled by today’s Republicans, of autocracy.
Even the most progressive legislatures, however, sometimes need a member or two who recognize unmet needs more immediately than their colleagues, and successfully prod those colleagues to do something about it. Over the past decade, both houses of the California legislature have seen the Democrats in control of between two-thirds and three-fourths of the seats, but the colleague who’s really pushed them to enact life-enhancing changes has been San Diego Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who announced earlier this week that she was stepping down from her post there.
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