09/10/2026
Fellow Libertarians,
While the bills in Sacramento are ongoing and usually horrible, here are two recent ones that are of particular interest to us.
AB 1803 would require employers with as few as five employees to incorporate state-mandated “anti-hate speech” instruction into required workplace training. Government has no business creating and enforcing special categories of offensive speech in private workplaces. Being a jerk is being a jerk. Workplace rules belong to the business owner, who already has every incentive to deal with employees whose behavior harms coworkers, customers, or the business itself. AB 1803 takes that decision out of private hands and replaces it with another government mandate, forcing businesses with as few as five employees to devote time to state-required training.
Unfortunately, AB 1803 has already passed the Legislature and is on the Governor’s desk. We missed the opportunity to stop it legislatively.
But we still have a chance to stop another insidious expansion of government authority before it gets that far.
AB 1851 would expand the role of government schools even further into children’s mental health and emotional development. California has already poured billions into programs that push schools beyond basic education and deeper into areas that belong to parents and families.
Meanwhile, California schools are doing a poor job at the basic academics they are supposedly there to provide. In the latest statewide testing, fewer than half of students met or exceeded the standard in English language arts. Only 37.3% did so in math.
The state is usurping a role that belongs to parents. Attendance at a government school does not give the state authority to involve itself in every aspect of a child’s development. AB 1851 expands that intrusion further. The state needs to get out of the way and leave parents to raise their children.
Most Libertarians ultimately want government out of education altogether. In the meantime, every expansion of the state’s authority over our children moves us further from that goal and pulls government schools further away from the basic education they supposedly exist to provide. California can barely get four in ten students to meet the standard in math. It has no business looking for more areas of our children’s lives to manage.
And we need to move quickly. AB 1803 passed the Senate on August 25 and received final legislative approval the next day. AB 1851 has not gotten that far. It is still in Senate Appropriations. We can still fight this one, but we need to act now.
Call the members of the Senate Appropriations Committee and tell them to oppose AB 1851:
Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-31), Chair: (916) 651-4031
Sen. Kelly Seyarto (R-32), Vice Chair: (916) 651-4032
Sen. Christopher Cabaldon (D-3): (916) 651-4003
Sen. Megan Dahle (R-1): (916) 651-4001
Sen. Tim Grayson (D-9): (916) 651-4009
Sen. Laura Richardson (D-35): (916) 651-4035
Senate Appropriations Committee: (916) 651-4101
AB 1803: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1803
AB 1851: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1851
-ks
