SAYING SAYONARA

California State Senator Defects From Democratic Party

Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil said she was abandoning the Democratic Party, whose supermajority in the legislature she claims is “simply not working for this state.”

A California state senator, fed up with the Democratic Party’s supermajority in the Golden State’s legislature, announced she is defecting to the Republican Party. Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil was elected in 2022 to represent California’s fourth senate district, which includes parts of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the agrarian Central Valley. Alvarado-Gil made the party switch announcement on Thursday, after serving two years of her four year term. “I was elected to serve the public, not a political ideology,” Alvarado-Gil said in a statement. “The status quo under a supermajority Democratic rule in the legislature is simply not working for this state.” In an interview with Sacramento Bee opinion columnist Marcos Bretón, Alvarado-Gil said the “last straw” was the attempt to pass reforms to Proposition 47—a decade-old ballot initiative that downgraded some property crimes like shoplifting, forgery, and writing bad checks to misdemeanors.