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Sal Rodriguez: Jeff Gonzalez and the art of the legislative faceplant

April 9, 2026

At the start of this year, Tennessee launched its first-in-the-nation domestic violence registry system. The premise isn’t complicated: if you publicly identify people convicted of domestic violence, members of the public might be able to protect themselves. But does that work? There’s not been anywhere near enough time to determine that.

Alas, this is an election year, and politicians like to look like they’re doing something when they’re up for re-election.

Enter first-term Republican Assemblyman Jeff Gonzalez, who in February introduced Assembly Bill 2701, the Domestic Violence Offender Registration Act, which follows the same general scheme of Tennessee but with some other details.

It would instruct the state Department of Justice to develop and publish a database including the names, addresses and dates of birth of people convicted of domestic violence-related crimes. It would compel those convicted to register for up to 20 years, and it would also establish a “petition process for an offender to seek removal from the registry before having completed the applicable term if they demonstrate rehabilitation and no new qualifying offenses, or they demonstrate exoneration.”

On Tuesday, the day he went before the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, I happened to be interviewing Gonzalez as part of this newspaper’s endorsement process when he brought up the bill. So I asked him some, I thought, obvious questions that would come to mind: What’s the evidence it would actually work rather than just ostracize people who completed their sentences? What’s the limiting principle of creating registries for crimes? Didn’t the state’s bipartisan overhaul of the sex offender registry illustrate the problem with such registries?

It wasn’t apparent to me that Gonzalez thought any of these counterpoints through. It also wasn’t a surprise that many of these points, and more, were brought up at the bill hearing by people much more knowledgeable about domestic violence issues than myself.

Indeed, the bill was opposed by the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, which explained, “While we recognize that this bill is well-intentioned, we believe it will harm survivors and that it does not, in any way, accomplish its stated goal of preventing domestic violence. Rather, as an expensive and ineffective distraction from the things we know prevent domestic violence and improve survivor well-being, this bill would be a step in the wrong direction for this state with regard to how it approaches the critical problem of domestic violence.”

Among the low-hanging problems with the bill are the reality that it expends finite state resources on a database and would put additional responsibilities on state and local authorities that could better be spent supporting and protecting domestic violence survivors.

In addition, victims of domestic violence or partners of people on the registry could experience all manner of challenges, including increased difficulty of obtaining employment or housing. Such implications could have a chilling effect on the reporting of such crimes by partners and spouses locked into messy and tumultuous relationships.

These are points made in these pages prior to the bill’s introduction by Jane Stoever, who heads up the UC Irvine Domestic Violence Clinic and the UCI Initiative to End Family Violence. “While obviously well-intentioned, a registry of this kind would list many wrongfully charged and convicted abuse survivors,” she noted. “Such a registry would also likely decrease domestic violence reporting and keep survivors in abusive situations.”

Stoever also highlighted the real possibility of victims of domestic violence ending up on such a registry, a point reiterated at the hearing by Kate Vander Tuig of Futures Without Violence. “This bill will harm many survivors directly, because many are wrongly arrested and labeled as perpetrators,” she said, citing an example from a Sacramento domestic violence program of a woman threatened by her partner with a knife, pushed back in self-defense, charged with domestic violence and nearly lost custody of her kids.

Even so, Gonzalez pressed on, including an awkward moment where he said of opposition to the domestic violence bill, “It’s a slap, I believe, my opinion, in the face of victims who have come up and spoken to me personally about this.”

Yikes.

At some point Gonzalez also invoked the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, which drew a sharp rebuke from Assemblyman James Ramos, the state’s first Native American member of the Assembly. “You mentioned missing, murdered and indigenous women, yet those that are on the front lines stand up in opposition to this bill. So if you truly were moving forward in that you would have had dialogue with them before you presented here today.”

Committee Chair Nick Schultz then proceeded to highlight myriad other problems with the bill and pointed to bills enhancing enforcement of restraining orders and increasing penalties for repeat domestic violence offenders as better ideas than Gonzalez’s bill.

And so, in the end Gonzalez’s bill was rejected and Gonzalez went to social media to declare, “Sacramento prioritizes CRIMINALS over VICTIMS,” confirming he didn’t understand any of the criticisms of his bill and why his bill would actually be to the detriment of many victims.

As a longtime critic of the Democratic supermajority, I understand that Republicans are supposed to be a bulwark to the overreaching, big-spending, tax-hiking tendencies of the Democrats. But if this is what they’re spending their time on and this is their approach to the legislative process, is it any wonder why Republicans are in the superminority?

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

Orange County Register

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Sal Rodriguez: Jeff Gonzalez and the art of the legislative faceplant

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