Fighting for progressive politics

Here’s a strange law with a major impact on progressive politics. California law makes it a crime for any county employee in the State to solicit any political contribution from any other employee of the same county. But the law allows any state employee to solicit a political contribution from any other state employee, including within in the same office, and regardless of how politically sensitive the work of that office may be.

Turns out that this weird and inexplicable difference makes life unduly hard for county employees to run for office. That especially includes candidates for District Attorney who have experience as defenders, and want to run for prosecutor on a progressive platform. The reason is that public defenders all work as county employees, so they aren’t allowed to solicit their fellow public defenders to support their candidacy. That’s crippling, because public defenders are often both close friends and ideologically aligned on this important issue.

We are trying to change things and make it easier for public defenders and other county employees to raise the money necessary to mount viable candidacies. We represent a club in Silicon Valley called Progressive Democrats for Social Justice, plus two of its remarkable members: founder and president Krista Henneman, and member Carlie Ware. We’ve sued the California Attorney General on their behalf contending that this bizarre restriction on county employees, including public defenders, is unconstitutional, because it doesn’t apply equally to state employees. Put differently, we think the law restricts our clients’ fundamental right of political participation in a way that irrationally discriminates among similarly situated people. Our complaint requests that court find the law unconstitutional, which would permit our clients to solicit money from anyone in the public defender’s office—so long as they do it ethically, of course.

It’s already hard enough to mount a progressive challenge to incumbent prosecutors. It shouldn’t be doubly hard because public defenders in California aren’t even allowed to raise money from their friends and colleagues to mount a credible challenge. We hope to change that with this case.

We’ll have more to say on this case in the coming weeks, as we move for an injunction and as the campaign for DA in Silicon Valley heats up.