California’s Yes Man: Meet the Democratic lawmaker who has never said ‘no’ to a bill

The Democrats who control California’s Legislature vote “no” on average less than 1% of the timessem. But one Assemblymember stands out even among this group of “yes” men and women. 

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Mike Fong, a Democrat from Monterey Park, is the only one of California’s 120 state lawmakers who has never cast a “no” vote on a piece of legislation, according to the Digital Democracy database. 

Fong has dutifully said “aye” during committee votes and pushed the green button at his desk on the Assembly floor 9,389 times since he was sworn in on Feb. 22, 2022.

Fong chairs the Assembly Higher Education Committee, and he sits on the Assembly’s appropriations and budget committees, giving the Los Angeles County lawmaker significant influence over how billions of Californians’ tax dollars are spent each year. 

Fong’s office didn’t respond to an interview request from CalMatters this week. His office also refused to make him available earlier this year to discuss his voting record for a CalMatters and CBS News investigation into the Legislature’s voting trends. 

The investigation in April revealed that California’s Democratic lawmakers vote “no” so rarely that critics say most of the 2,000-plus bills introduced each year appear to be decided in advance behind closed doors.

With the adjournment of the Legislature’s two-year session in August, the latest Digital Democracy data shows that the pattern hasn’t changed. Democrats voted “no” less than half of 1% of the time. Forty-seven of the 120 legislators voted “no” less than 10 times. During the two-year session, a Democratic lawmaker on average had around 4,800 opportunities to vote on bills.

The fact that Fong has yet to say “no” to any of the thousands of bills he’s considered in the past 33 months was one of the main reasons Long “David” Liu decided to run against Fong in this year’s election. Liu, a Republican lawyer who heads a City of Industry law firm, is a longshot in the safely Democratic district that includes large Asian American communities southeast of Pasadena. 

“It’s such a sacred sort of job to cast a vote as an Assemblymember on the laws that would affect every single person living in the state of California,” Liu told CalMatters. “And he just casts his basic vote without knowing what the bill is, without knowing what the bill is about. I mean, just that’s scary.“

Fong said ‘no’ but not to a bill

One of the Legislature’s most prominent critics was also flummoxed by Fong’s propensity to vote “aye” so often.

Scott Kaufman, a lobbyist for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and a frequent critic of Democratic spending policies, told CalMatters that at first he couldn’t believe Fong had never voted “no.” He checked his group’s internal vote tracker and confirmed Digital Democracy’s findings.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe