A bunch of news organizations are sounding the alarm about a California bill that critics are calling the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” saying that it “criminalizes investigative journalism.” They can save their breath, because the author is stupid, the bill is stupid, and none of it is ever going to mean anything.
The critics are right about intent, and the petulant Democrat who introduced the bill – Mia Bonta, the wife of appalling California Attorney General Rob Bonta – hopes to make it seem harder for conservative journalists to talk about illegal immigration and the abuse of the welfare state. The legislative intent is to snivel about mean right-wingers and make them shut up. But as a potential future law, it’s just not going to work.
California does this, exactly this, more often than you realize. Parents criticized school boards during the pandemic, so the dimwitted state legislature passed a bill to criminalize the criticism of school boards. Watering it down to try to wedge it past the First Amendment, the author added a bunch of narrow conditions to the things that would qualify as criminal school board criticism: It’s illegal to criticize a school board if you do this and this and this. The bill in its final form said that it would be a crime to violently threaten or aggressively and personally harass school officials. It banned violence.
You can already see where this is going, but here it is: Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the thing, quite reasonably pointing out that it made a bunch of crimes illegal: “Credible threats of violence and acts of harassment – whether directed against school officials, elected officials, or members of the general public – can already be prosecuted as crimes. As such, creating a new crime is unnecessary.” The legislature, enraged that the peasantry would dare to criticize their superiors in government, banned some banned behaviors. It’s not rational lawmaking – it’s a tantrum.
See also SB 1100, introduced by state Sen. Dave Cortese in 2022 after the audience at a city council meeting in Silicon Valley yelled at a thin-skinned mayor. (Sample news headline: “State lawmakers demand action following attacks on Los Gatos mayor.” The “attacks” were that people openly criticized her during a public meeting.) This one was signed into law, and allows local legislative bodies like a city council or a school board to eject citizens from a public meeting if the presiding officer feels that the citizens are being disruptive.
But almost no one has actually tried to use this dumb law, and here’s what happened to a school board that tried to exclude critics from a public meeting in the post-SB 1100 political environment: “Temecula Residents Sue School Board and its President for First Amendment and Brown Act Violations.” (The Brown Act is the state’s public meeting law for local government.)
So yes, California has a habit of trying to make it illegal to criticize privileged classes like politicians, and now they’re going to playact at punishing people for being Nick Shirley and asking immigration-focused NGOs where the money went. But go read the tortured, convoluted, and deadly dull language of the actual bill, AB 2624, which proposes (among other things) the creation of a program in which people who provide services to immigrants can apply to a special new state program to have their personal information protected.
Here’s just a small sample of what that means, from a point about a third of the way through the bill: “If the applicant alleges that the basis for the application is that the applicant is a designated immigration support services facility volunteer, the application shall, in addition to the documents specified in paragraph (1), be accompanied by documentation by the designated immigration support services facility showing the length of time the volunteer has committed to working at the facility.”
The actual text of the bill is about allowing people to submit a half a ton of paperwork to a state program so the state can tell people not to be mean to you.
Keep reading: “Notwithstanding subdivision (a), program participants shall comply with the provisions specified in subdivision (d) of Section 1808.21 of the Vehicle Code if requesting suppression of the records maintained by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Program participants shall also comply with all other provisions of the Vehicle Code relating to providing current address information to the department.”
It’s just a bunch of laughable bureaucratic process. Here’s how a Nick Shirley could, in theory, be stopped from or punished for posting personal information about someone involved in immigrant support services: “A person, business, or association shall not knowingly post the home address of a program participant, or of the program participant’s residing spouse or child, on the internet knowing that person is a program participant and intending to cause imminent great bodily harm that is likely to occur or threatening to cause imminent great bodily harm to that individual.”
It’s only a crime to say where a program is sheltering immigrants if a journalist provably intends in advance to cause “imminent great bodily harm” by posting the information. Again, trying to wedge past the First Amendment, legislators have added a bunch of absurd conditions that make the proposed law functionally meaningless. They want to make it illegal to intend to get someone to murder people, which is already illegal. Familiar.
The point of this legislation was to produce headlines telling people like Nick Shirley that California doesn’t like them. It’s not going to produce a meaningful new law. The legislature is doing performative outrage, as they often do, and it’s going to end in the usual result of nothing much. Never underestimate the worthlessness of the California legislature.
