A Year to Forget

This year may go down as one of the most pathetic in the history of the state Legislature. Not only did Sacramento lawmakers spend nearly all of 2009 groping for solutions to the state’s intractable budget problems, but the Legislature failed to enact any significant reforms that would help solve California’s other major issues. As for Democrats, the only semblance of progress they made was passing a watered-down version of a prison reform bill that was weaker than the one proposed by the state’s Republican governor.