In the News

April 19, 2023

State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-East Bay) chairs the California Legislative Women's Caucus and said lawmakers already passed more than a dozen bills aimed at protecting abortion rights since the Supreme Court overruled Roe vs. Wade. Skinner promised more legislation is coming. 

"It's 17 bills, and those bills will further expand out protections and recognize that our health care practitioners provide health care to women all over the country," Skinner said.

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April 17, 2023

A new bill, proposed last month by State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would require that all new electric vehicles in California are equipped with so-called “bidirectional” charging by 2027. Passage of SB 233, which will be heard tomorrow before the Senate Energy Committee and on April 25 before the Senate Transportation Committee, could make two-way charging the norm, not a special feature.

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April 16, 2023

While the racist banter wasn’t necessarily illegal, it runs afoul of city and department policies. Recent laws require departments to disclose disciplinary records of certain types of officer misconduct and establish a process for the state to decertify problem cops so they can’t work for other departments.

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April 13, 2023

A Bay Area lawmaker's push to punish social media content that harms children took a big step forward on Tuesday.

Senate Bill 287, authored by California State Senator Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would require social media companies to perform regular audits to show they are not causing social media addiction in people under the age of 18. The bill also would punish social media companies for knowingly harming children in a variety of ways including:

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April 12, 2023

A California bill seeking to hold social media companies legally responsible for addicting young users to their platforms advanced, clearing an initial hurdle after it was amended to allow lawsuits only by public prosecutors.

The legislation, which has drawn strong opposition from the tech industry, would prohibit companies such as Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., TikTok Inc. and Google from designing social media to hook users younger than 18 years old and provides for penalties of up to $250,000 for each violation.

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April 11, 2023

Abortion restrictions are about power — particularly dominance over Black and brown women. And even the overturning of Roe vs. Wade last summer didn’t drive that home quite so much as Friday’s ruling from an ultraconservative Texas judge whose court order, if it stands, would thwart access to the safest and most common drug in use for chemical abortions by the end of this week.

“Misogyny amongst certain parts of our culture knows no bounds,” state Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat and head of the California Legislative Women’s Caucus, told me.

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