California Democrats are tougher on businesses than they are on child trafficking ...Middle East

If only California’s super-majority leading Democrats treated everyone with the kindness, understanding and leniency they show child sex predators.

Last week, Democrats crushed an effort by one of their own members, Assemblywoman Maggy Krell, to equalize the penalties for purchasing for a child for sex. It’s an automatic felony in California if the child is 15 or younger, but for 16- and 17-year-olds, it’s a misdemeanor. It can be charged as a felony if the child was trafficked, but the burden of proving that the child was trafficked, believe it or not, falls on the child. That was the outcome of a 2024 deal to pass Senate Bill 1414, a deal that was forced on author Sen. Shannon Grove as a condition of toughening penalties on those who buy children for sex.

Some people might say that like a turtle on a fence post, if you see 16- or 17-year-old prostitutes on the street, they didn’t get there by themselves. But that’s not the view of Sen. Scott Wiener, who last year led the charge to pass a bill that decriminalized loitering for prostitution, a law that Krell’s bill, AB 379, would largely reverse.

Wiener posted on social media that he supports lighter penalties for buying 16- and 17-year-olds because it’s not “smart criminal justice policy” to send “an 18-year-old high school senior to state prison for offering his 17-year-old classmate $20 to fool around.”

We’re not going to guess how often that happens, if ever, but it’s an odd justification for opposing a law to protect children by cracking down on the predators who provide the lifeblood of cash for the atrocity of trafficking teens for sex.

Wiener has a completely different view of how the law should be enforced against job-creating businesses. He has introduced Senate Bill 310, which blows up a deal made last year to enact legislative reforms to the state’s shakedown-enabling Private Attorneys General Act.  PAGA, as it’s known, allows private attorneys to enforce the provisions of the state’s monster-length labor code. Business groups have long criticized the law, which they say encourages unscrupulous attorneys to target businesses with lawsuits that may be meritless, but are less expensive to settle than to defend.

Last year, proponents of a PAGA reform initiative agreed to withdraw it from the November ballot in exchange for the governor’s signature on two bills that gave businesses some protections, including time to cure violations before litigation could commence and a process for settling disputes outside of court. The idea was to reduce costs for employers while still protecting workers.

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There’s nothing new about the merciless treatment of businesses in California. Ask the trucking industry how much understanding they were shown when their engines were outlawed by the California Air Resources Board. Ask the restaurant industry what they have to go through to get a permit for a char-broiler. From laws that penalize businesses for not removing graffiti fast enough to regulations that are driving oil companies to close refineries to hyper-regulation of legal marijuana businesses, fines and penalties are imposed that make businesses unsustainable.

Why an exception has been made for the child prostitution business is a question voters should ask their representatives.

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