On August 28, Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley issued a twelve-page opinion in Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association v Brown, Sacramento, 34-2016-80002512.  It says that a 2016 bill, SB 1107, violates the California Constitution and is therefore void.

SB 1107 removed a prohibition on public funding of campaigns from the election code.  The statutory ban on public funding of campaigns that existed before 2016 was in the law because in 1988, the voters had passed an initiative, Proposition 73, that banned public funding.  However, proposition 73 said that the legislature could amend its provisions if they were in accord with the basic purposes of an earlier campaign finance constitutional  initiative passed in 1974.

California does not permit the legislature to amend voter initiatives unless the initiative says that the initiative can be amended by the legislature in specific ways.  Nevertheless, in 2016, the California legislature repealed the ban on public funding of campaigns.  The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association then sued to overturn SB 1107, and the Taxpayers Association has now won that lawsuit, at least at the trial court level.  It is unknown if the government will appeal.

The issue is more complicated than one might think, because the California Constitutional provisions relating to campaign finance have been changed by several initiatives over the last decades, and the legislature did have a somewhat plausible argument that it could do what it did.  However, the legislature’s arguments didn’t prevail.