My least favorite legislator—Senator Jackie Speier, a Democrat from the Bay Area—wants to change the lieutenant governor’s office from a “do-nothing” office into an activist office which has its hands in higher education and consumer issues. In fact, she thinks the lieutenant governor should be the "guardian of higher education in California.”
Everyone who runs for the lieutenant governor job wants to make it more important than it is. Frankly, to make it a more valuable job, we should run the governor and lieutenant governor on the same ticket…but that’s another topic. Mostly, what the state doesn’t need is Jackie Speier in a constitutional office.
Speier is constantly writing silly, one-issue bills that have no business being considered as laws. 
Some examples of her handiwork include a 2001 law which requires warehouse stores to protect customers from falling merchandise. Or the law which required travel business to register with the Attorney General’s office and comply with a host of new rules because—GASP—40 travel businesses went out of business between 1984 and 1995. Or the 1999 bill which required the Department of Food and Ag to create a toll-free number and website so people could call the STATE to find out where the lowest priced milk was being sold. Or (this is my personal favorite) the 1995 law that required dry cleaners to charge women the same price for cleaning shirts or alterations as they charged men. You can read for yourself her whole “legislative record” by clicking here.
Speier’s idea of good government is when government is involved in every decision—retail, medical or otherwise—that we make in our daily lives. Now that she’s being termed out of the Senate, she’s got her eye on the lieutenant governor’s office and then the governor’s office (although she told a reporter for the Argus that, while she would “absolutely” consider running for governor, she doesn’t “…think the electorate in
Let’s hope that fellow Bay Area Democrat Sen. Liz Figueroa knocks Speier out of the lieutenant governor’s race in the primary. It’ll be a great day when we’re free of Speier’s brand of lawmaking!