legislation

FOOTHILL FARMS, Calif. — As a California state lawmaker, Richard Pan authored some of the strongest vaccine laws in the country.

His reward — and part of the backlash, on top of death threats — was being physically assaulted outside the Capitol in Sacramento and spattered with blood thrown from the gallery.

Now, a few years removed from the state Senate and teaching health policy at UC Davis, Pan is running for Congress, in part to fight an old nemesis, the terminally misguided Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and to arrest the Trump administration’s sledgehammering of the nation’s public healthcare system.

“We need people in Congress who have the background, the training, the knowledge to basically hold this administration accountable,” Pan said last week on a baking 100-degree day in the Sacramento suburbs.

“I know what it’s like to be on the front lines,” said Pan, who spent a dozen years teaching and practicing pediatrics before being elected to the Assembly in 2010. “I’ve seen measles, right?”

In fact, his push to toughen vaccination requirements was spurred by a 2014-15 measles outbreak at Disneyland, which, at the time, was one of the largest and most significant epidemics to arise after the disease was supposedly eliminated from the U.S. in 2000.

Little did we know.

Every action has an equal and opposition reaction, a law of physics that’s equally applicable to the realm of politics.

Pan is part of a wave of doctors and scientists running for office this November — for school boards, city councils, state legislatures, the House and U.S. Senate — owing in good part to Kennedy’s quackery and the hollowing out of such vital health and research agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

The political organization 3.14 Action — its name a decimal approximation of pi — has recruited and helped elect hundreds of candidates from STEM backgrounds (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and endorsed more than 500 of those running this year, including Pan in his race in Sacramento and in neighboring Placer and Yolo counties.

Dr. Richard Pan meets Dr. Teah Harris-Johnson and her daughter before participating in a roundtable discussion at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who worked on drug discovery and breast cancer research, founded 3.14 Action in 2016 after two unsuccessful tries for a congressional seat in the Philadelphia suburbs. When she started the organization, Naughton noted, there were more talk radio hosts on Capitol Hill than scientists and engineers. (Nearly two dozen doctors and nurses currently serve in Congress. More than 30 have run this election cycle.)

“There isn’t an issue that doesn’t benefit by having fact-based decision-makers, people that will go into office as problem-solvers,” Naughton said from Pennsylvania, which is in the throes of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in more than three decades. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy has downplayed the severity, even as the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases is rising.

“That’s essentially what scientists and physicians are,” Naughton said. “They are problem-solvers. and clearly our country is facing a lot of problems.”

Among those she cited was “the arsonist in charge of HHS.”

Pan has a history with Kennedy, who has long reigned as one of the country’s preeminent anti-vaxxers.

In 2015, he helped summon hundreds of demonstrators to Sacramento to protest Pan’s legislation tightening vaccination requirements. (Kennedy later apologized for using the word “holocaust” to condemn the proposed law, though he revisited the Nazi analogy during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

In 2019, Kennedy returned to Sacramento to oppose another bill Pan authored, this one tightening the rules for vaccination exemptions. Again, he was joined by an army of protesters. Tensions peaked when a demonstrator threw a cup of blood from the spectators’ gallery onto the Senate floor, halting business for several hours before the bill passed.

Dr. Richard Pan sits between Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood and Sean Frame, a candidate for state Senate, at the maternal health roundtable.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Pan’s opponent in November is Rep. Kevin Kiley, a conservative Republican running as an independent.

Seeking election in a Democratic-tilting district drawn under Proposition 50, the voter-passed gerrymander, Kiley has sought to distance himself from Trump and the MAGA movement, saying he would not caucus with GOP lawmakers if he returned to Washington.

Like his jury-rigged political persona, Kiley seems to want it both ways on vaccines.

Before going to Congress, while serving in the Assembly, Kiley voted against Pan’s legislation cracking down on fraudulent vaccine exemptions. He’s described vaccines as a vital public health tool, but condemned government mandates and suggested vaccination should be a matter of parental choice. He claims Pan has eroded public trust by politicizing the issue.

As for Kennedy, Kiley told the San Francisco Chronicle a lot of things “that I don’t agree with,” though he’s never called out the secretary for his cuckoo-land theories — vaccines cause autism, the fluoride in public water supplies is making Americans “stupider,” and many more — or denounced his destructive policies.

That passivity, Pan said, amounts to complicity.

“It’s not just simply a talking point,” Pan said of public health policy. “It’s reality and we need to have policy based on what’s really happening, not on some ideological conspiracy theory.”

Dr. Richard Pan participates in a discussion during a Black maternal health roundtable last week at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Pan’s campaign is focused on more than vaccines and RFK Jr.

Like most Democrats, he’s made affordability a key part of his candidacy, citing higher gas and grocery prices and, inevitably, the rising cost of healthcare and the roughly $1-trillion cut from Medicaid under last year’s Big Sop To Billionaires Bill.

The super-wealthy got tax cuts, Pan told a silver-haired audience at a 55-and-older community in Roseville, while the bill will make healthcare less accessible for millions and undermine both Medicare and Social Security. Kiley supported the legislation, the centerpiece of Trump’s second term. As a doctor and state lawmaker, Pan said, he worked to expand healthcare and address the needs of his community.

“We don’t pass laws to make lives harder,” Pan said. “That’s what he’s done.”

Later, at a forum on Black maternal health, Pan said Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the so-called war on woke ignores glaring disparities in the treatment of Black women versus other patients. “The data is there,” said Pan, speaking before a banner decorated with purple butterflies and the proclamation, “Black Mothers Matter.”

“The facts are there,” Pan went on. “It’s a very, very real problem and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be solved.”

He brought up, somewhat sheepishly, his campaign.

“That’s why I’m running,” Pan said, to “have another person in Congress … who’s going to tell the administration we are not going to bury DEI. We’re not going to bury disparities. These are real problems.”

As is the assault on science, the undermining of research and the promotion of nutty nostrums by those at the highest levels of the federal government.

Hopefully, the midterm election will begin the healing process.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a raft of bills designed to push back on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement in California, including bans on electric shock gloves and a revamped ban on law enforcement face coverings after a previous law was blocked by a federal judge.

The more than 20 bills approved by the governor Tuesday were crafted to thwart tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, including the use of facial coverings and making arrests outside immigration hearings. Other bills are meant to boost state oversight of federal detention centers in the state.

“Trump has put his political interests above the health, safety and livelihood of American families. California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state,” Newsom said in a statement. “This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities. We will continue protecting our people, upholding the rule of law, and making clear that if the federal government operates in California, we will hold them accountable.”

The governor signed legislation to ban the use of electric shock gloves by any law enforcement in the state, which was hastily written and passed after reports that the Department of Homeland Security planned to spend $20 million to outfit agents with the gloves.

One bill, dubbed the “No Kings Act,” makes it easier for residents to sue federal agents for alleged civil rights violations, such as racial profiling, unlawful searches or interfering with the right to free speech.

Its author, Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said the law already applies to state and local officials and that his bill, SB 747, closes a loophole that exempts federal officials.

Newsom signed another bill by Wiener that bans ICE agents and other law enforcement from wearing face coverings or masks while on duty. After a federal judge blocked his prior bill, which applied to federal agents but not state police, Wiener passed legislation that applies to both.

Many of the bills Newsom signed Tuesday aim to improve state oversight at immigration detention centers within the state and slowroll the development of new facilities.

Among them is AB 1801, which requires municipalities to wait at least 180 days and hold public hearings before approving any plans to build or convert facilities into immigration detention centers.

Newsom signed a 25% tax on companies that operate immigration detention centers in the state. Most of the detention centers in California are run by the private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic, under contracts with the federal government. AB 1633 by Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) would raise an estimated $177 million, according to a fiscal analysis of the bill.

Another new law requires local agencies to disclose 911 calls made from immigration detention centers. It stems from a CalMatters investigation which found alleged sexual assaults at Otay Mesa, a detention center in San Diego, were being investigated by CoreCivic, the company that operates the facility, rather than local law enforcement.

“Our communities deserve safety, and no person in detention should have to resort to throwing notes over the walls of a detention facility to have their needs met and their voice heard,” Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), chair of the Legislative Latino Caucus and the bill’s author, said in a statement after lawmakers passed her legislation.

Activists and Democratic lawmakers have raised alarms about the rising number of in-custody deaths and poor conditions inside ICE detention facilities. The federal government has reported 57 in-custody deaths during Trump’s second term, up from the 26 deaths reported during the previous four years.

During reviews of detention centers around the state last year, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office found substandard conditions including overcrowding, delays in medical care and poor quality food and drinking water. At one center, detainees were not given clothing warm enough to protect against extremely low temperatures in the facility, Justice Department staff reported.

Newsom signed legislation indefinitely extending the attorney general’s duty to review private detention centers, which had been set to expire next year.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills Saturday that increases protections for LGBTQ people in California, saying the legislation was needed because of recent moves by the Trump administration that threaten that support.

One of the six bills would provide housing, employment and other help to service members discharged from the U.S. military as a result of President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban transgender people from serving.

“I’m grateful to Governor Newsom for signing this legislation and proud that California is standing with the veterans who were unjustly forced out of uniform,” said Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego), the author of Assembly Bill 1775.

Other bills Newsom signed create stronger privacy protections by limiting the sharing of sexual orientation and gender identity, while also requiring healthcare providers to notify the California Attorney General when they receive a subpoena regarding healthcare activities the state protects.

Another new law will enhance access to drugs known as PrEP and PEP, which are aimed at preventing HIV.

“The Trump administration has launched an all-out assault on the LGBTQ community, using medical records to target U.S. servicemembers and civilians alike, hurting countless people and betraying hard-won trust,” Newsom’s office said in a press release. “California will not stand for it.”

The bills Newsom signed Saturday were priority bills of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus.

Since taking office in 2019, Newsom has signed dozens of bills adding protections for LGBTQ people.

The governor’s office noted that this year’s state budget included $66 million to help people get access to gender-affirming care and abortion.

“I’m proud of the work our Caucus has done to advance legislation that meets the real needs of our community, and I thank Governor Newsom for signing these important bills,” said state Senator Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside), who is chair-elect of the LGBTQ Caucus.

“This progress reflects what we can accomplish when we work together to build a California where LGBTQ+ people and their families can live with greater safety, opportunity, and dignity,” Cervantes said.

PHOENIX — Former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, a longtime Republican lawmaker from Arizona who shaped landmark water policies in the U.S. West and guided the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has died. He was 84.

Kyl died Wednesday night from a neurological disorder, said Gordon James, a communications professional who is a longtime friend of the Kyl family. Kyl had withdrawn from public life in December 2025 after announcing he had been diagnosed with dementia.

Kyl spent almost three decades in Congress, serving in both chambers, and watched his party undergo a drastic transformation, with his career spanning Ronald Reagan’s presidency to President Trump’s first term.

Former Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who considered Kyl a mentor, described the former senator in a February 2025 interview with the Associated Press as a true statesman and a “workhorse” among Washington, D.C.’s “showhorses.”

“If you saw him on the plane, he was sitting in the aisle, in coach, and he was reading,” Ducey said. “And he was reading potential bills or Senate business.”

Kyl returns briefly to Senate to fill McCain seat

Kyl rose to a leadership position during his last full term in the Senate, when his Republican colleagues selected him as minority whip. After retiring from politics in 2013 and becoming a lobbyist, Kyl returned to Congress briefly in 2018, when Ducey appointed him to fill the vacancy left by the late U.S. Sen. John McCain.

His appointment drew high praise from Trump, who said he was looking forward to working with “the extraordinary senator.” Kyl stayed for less than four months before rejoining lobbying firm Covington and Burling.

“At the federal level, and I regret to say that this is the case, but probably a lot of my better achievements were in preventing bad things from happening (rather) than forcing good things to happen,” Kyl said in a 2012 conversation with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Lawyer with expertise in water gets elected

Kyl was born in Oakland, Nebraska, on April 25, 1942, and grew up in a rural farming district in Iowa that his father represented in the U.S. House. At 18, he headed southwest to attend the University of Arizona, where he met his wife, Caryll, and earned a law degree.

Before being elected for the first of his four terms in the House in 1987, Kyl was a key participant in shaping Arizona’s 1980 groundwater code as a lawyer representing a large water utility. The first-of-its-kind code created a regulatory framework for managing groundwater in the drought-stricken state, largely centering on the state’s population centers, including Phoenix and Tucson.

In 2004, Kyl authored legislation that provided one of the largest tribal water rights settlements, which, after a decades-long battle, gave the Gila River Indian Community enough water to fill nearly 313,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools annually. Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who later served as majority leader, called Kyl’s work ethic “legendary” in a 2012 floor speech and said Kyl had labored mostly behind the scenes for 15 years to advance the settlement.

“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I was in a position to be the catalyst,” Kyl told the Phoenix New Times in a 2006 interview. “There wasn’t anybody else who could do that water deal. And it had to be done.”

Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy takes its name from him. Its director, Sarah Porter, said Kyl was generous with his time and an effective member of the state’s congressional delegation who took a practical approach to water policy. “He’s always sort of cared about the public good and been able to think about, ‘What will this mean for the generations to come?’” Porter said, adding that Kyl remained “quite a dynamo” until recent years, as his wife battled health problems.

‘Giant’ in the Senate kept Republican caucus together

Ducey said Kyl was a “giant” in the Senate, further describing him as serious, engaging, forthright and thoughtful. His biggest impacts, Ducey said, came from the way he kept the Republican caucus together in opposition to Obamacare and his staunch support of Israel.

Kyl also backed legislation to authorize construction of a fence stretching hundreds of miles along the U.S.-Mexico border. He later joined with Democrats to support a bill that would provide a path to citizenship and temporary guest-worker status for those in the U.S. without authorization. The proposal ultimately failed.

As a lobbyist, Kyl helped guide the confirmation of Trump-picked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When Kyl returned to the halls of Congress in 2018, he was known as Kavanaugh’s chief Sherpa — an informal but widely known term for a nominee’s guide to the political tundra in the Senate.

In a statement disclosing his dementia diagnosis, Kyl harkened back to the words of Reagan, when the former president revealed his own Alzheimer’s diagnosis and said he was starting a journey that would lead him to the end of his life.

Kyl said he shared Reagan’s confidence for Arizona and the nation’s future, and that despite his diagnosis, he was a “very fortunate man.”

Billeaud writes for the Associated Press. Former Associated Press writer Sejal Govindarao contributed to this report.

Byron Sher, a Stanford law professor-turned California legislator who wrote some of the state’s most far-reaching environmental laws, died Saturday. He was 98.

Cerebral and soft-spoken, Sher was the antithesis of politicians nowadays. He rarely issued press releases, didn’t convene news conferences, and disliked raising campaign money.

But he left an indelible mark on the environment, authoring legislation offering incentives to recycle, limiting advertisers’ inflated claims about products’ environmental benefits and combating water and air pollution.

He helped lead the effort to preserve ancient redwoods in Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County in 1999, pushing the state and federal government to buy it from Texas financier Charles Hurwitz, who owned Pacific Lumber Co. and was preparing to log it.

A decade earlier, in 1988, Sher authored legislation requiring that California take stock of the sources of greenhouse gases. It was the first time the legislature in California — or any other state — embedded the term “global warming” into a state law, and became the foundation for bills in later decades to combat climate change.

“The heat is on,’’ Sher said presciently, as quoted by the Sacramento Bee on May 5, 1989. “The state can either ignore what science is telling us, or we can respond to this challenge in a responsible way.’’

Because of his legislation, manufacturers today sell more products in spray bottles rather than aerosol cans, people can more easily dispose of televisions and other electronic waste, and underground gasoline storage tanks rarely leak and foul groundwater.

“Byron Sher built the legal and research foundation for California’s climate change regime and by extension helped shape how the world has tried to handle climate change,” said Joe Mathews, a Berggruen Institute fellow who is working on a book about the state’s legislative efforts to confront global warming.

Today, Sher’s 1989 legislation creating state wild and scenic rivers is a barrier to President Trump’s proposal to raise Shasta Dam north of Redding to increase water storage, an idea backed by Central Valley farming interests. His legislation protects the McCloud River, which feeds Shasta Reservoir. Raising the dam would inundate habitat along the McCloud.

That Sher placed such ideas into law reflected his ability to persuade and compromise. Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, signed the wild rivers legislation, and Sher’s Clean Air Act, which helped shape federal clean air legislation signed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.

Their partisan differences aside, Deukmejian viewed Sher as having “great personal integrity,” said Steve Merksamer, who was Deukmejian’s chief of staff.

“When Byron Sher wanted to come into the office and had the bill, would he get in? Absolutely. Would the governor listen to him? Yes,” Merksamer said.

Sher did fall short of convincing Deukmejian to sign one of his bills — a whimsical measure inspired by a Camp Fire girls and boys troop to proclaim the banana slug to be the official state mollusk. Deukmejian vetoed the bill, though Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2024 designating the slimy yellow creature as the official state slug.

Sher was born in St. Louis in 1928, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1952, and joined the Stanford Law School faculty in 1957. He served on the Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s, got recalled in 1967 over his opposition to development and won back his seat in the 1970s. Sher was Palo Alto mayor in 1980 when he won an Assembly seat. He remained in the Assembly until 1996 when he was elected to the state Senate, serving until 2004 when term limits forced him to step aside.

Among the students who passed through his Stanford classrooms was Newsom’s father, William Newsom, who became a state court of appeals justice.

Sher and his aide and friend Kip Lipper attended a 2010 banquet in San Francisco at which the California League of Conservation Voters honored Justice Newsom with the Byron Sher Lifetime Achievement Award. In his acceptance speech, Newsom recalled that Sher was the only Sanford professor who gave him a C. When Lipper asked whether the story was true, Sher deadpanned, “He deserved it.”

“There aren’t a lot of tales to tell about Byron Sher,” said Bill Lockyer, who was Senate leader when Sher won a state seat in 1996. “He went home at night and tended not to get into the Capitol gossip.”

In 1996, Lockyer entrusted Sher to serve on a joint Assembly-Senate conference committee that produced landmark legislation that sought to deregulate California’s electricity system.

Sher added provisions expanding requirements that the state use renewable sources of electricity and called the legislation “an extraordinary result” given the issue’s complexity. Lockyer said Sher’s additions, while important, were “the cherry on top of the toxic sundae.”

The legislation was blamed for California’s electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001 when swashbuckling energy traders manipulated the markets, causing prices to spike, resulting in rolling blackouts, and fueling the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

Sher was notable for measures he refused to support. With a few other liberal Democrats, nicknamed the Grizzlies, Sher would pick through turgid language of legislation looking for provisions that reflected the undue influence of special interests.

Sher voted against 1986 legislation that purported to open the way for a shrimp processing facility in West Sacramento. The bill turned out to be part of an elaborate FBI sting that resulted in 14 legislators, lobbyists and others being sent to prison.

“He wasn’t a comfortable politician,” said San Mateo County Supervisor Jackie Speier, a former Democratic congresswoman who served in the Legislature with Sher. “He didn’t speak up a lot. So, when he did, people listened.”

He displayed partisan side in 1994 when Republicans took a 41-seat majority in the 80-seat Assembly, and Republican Assemblyman Jim Brulte was in line to be elected speaker. But Democratic Speaker Willie Brown had a Republican supporter, Paul Horcher, who voted to retain Brown as speaker, plunging the two parties into a yearlong fight for control.

To wrest control from Republicans, Brown asked the professorial Sher to challenge one Republican’s right to remain in the Assembly. That Republican, Richard Mountjoy of the San Gabriel Valley, won two elections that November — one to the Assembly and the other in a special state Senate election to fill the seat vacated when the incumbent, Frank Hill, was sentenced to prison in the corruption scandal.

Sher reasoned that Mountjoy had to make up his mind — stay in the Assembly or move to the Senate. Facing term limits in the Assembly, Mountjoy joined the Senate in January 1995. The partisan battle went on all that year.

Brulte, who never did become speaker, was elected to the Senate in 1996, as was Sher. On Sunday, he called Sher “a wonderful man.”

“Everything in politics today is personal. It wasn’t personal,” Brulte said of Sher’s role in the speakership battle. “Somebody may have taken it personally, but I certainly didn’t.”

Sher retired to a pear orchard in the Sierra Nevada foothills and served on Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and Sierra Nevada Conservancy.

His wife of 62 years, Linda Bowser Sher, died in 2014. He is survived by three children, five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Morain is a former Los Angeles Times reporter.

Paris: The French government submitted a reworked proposal to ban social media for children, after its previous ban was struck down by the country’s top constitutional authority, President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday.

“After rigorous technical work the government today is notifying” the European Commission of the new draft, Macron wrote on X. The notification is a key step, as it ensures that the legislation is in line with European Union laws.