Senator Brian Jones

Every year California finds a new way to make ends meet without actually fixing the problem. This year it is your health insurance bill. Democrats are raising the tax on health insurers to patch a budget hole of their own making and dressing it up as healthcare policy. The math is simple. Individuals pay $100 more a year. Families of four pay $400 more. None of that money goes toward better care. It goes toward covering decisions that were never sustainable in the first place. California has spent more than it takes in for years and somehow the bill always finds its way back to the same place. Your wallet.

California just received its last shipment of Middle Eastern oil. Nothing else is coming. We have over one billion barrels of proved reserves right here in this state and the refinery capacity to process far more than we produce.

Instead we import 60 percent of our oil from foreign countries because decades of failed policy made it nearly impossible to drill our own.

This did not happen because of a war. It happened because of choices made in this state over many years. The vulnerability was built here. The solution is here too.

California's Democratic supermajority borrowed $28 billion from other state funds, drained $12.2 billion from the rainy day fund, and is still staring down a $27 billion structural deficit by 2027.

They did not fix the budget. They hid it. Now they want to raise your taxes to cover the mess they made. This is what happens when one party controls everything with zero accountability.

Californians deserve better.

California parents have a fundamental right to know what is happening with their own children at school. Rob Bonta decided that right was worth fighting all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost. And now California taxpayers are on the hook for $4.5 million in legal fees because our Attorney General chose to fight parents instead of protect them. This is not just a policy disagreement. This is a pattern of this administration putting its ideology ahead of the families it is supposed to serve. California parents deserve better and we are going to keep fighting until they get it.

This is American energy produced on American soil running through American pipelines to an American refinery. And Newsom is in court right now trying to shut it down. California drivers are paying nearly $6 a gallon and our governor is fighting domestic oil production that would provide real relief. The priorities could not be more backwards.

Yesterday my bill SB 1377 was heard in the Senate Health Committee. Did you know that in California your child's doctor can be investigated simply for issuing “too many” vaccine exemptions, even when every single one was medically necessary for their patients? The state set an arbitrary limit and good doctors are being penalized for doing their jobs.

SB 1377 puts the decision back where it belongs. With the doctor who knows your child. Not a government office that has never met them.