A classic line from a baseball movie aptly typifies a stupid play perpetrated by some Democratic state legislators.

What happened in the California State Assembly was really a bush-league mistake.

In the 1988 movie Bull Durham, arguably the greatest baseball movie ever made, an exasperated minor league manager heatedly lectures his inept team: Baseball is a simple game. You throw the ball. You catch the ball. You hit the ball.

You’ve got it?

Likewise, the hard game of legislation can be easy. Not always, but sometimes.

For example: if a pimp peddles children for sex and provides children for pedophiles, it is a serious crime.

No ifs or buts.

Do you get it, Democrats?

And simple doesn’t necessarily mean simplistic. Often it is synonymous with common sense.

It’s the truth and practicality of the real world, even if it doesn’t fit well into anyone’s handbook of abstract ideology.

Fortunately for the Democrats, Gov. Gavin Newsom and new Speaker of Parliament Robert Rivas of rural Hollister in San Benito County recognized good policy and read the political playing field. They saved their party from a potentially costly public backlash.

This is what I’m grumbling about:

Two months ago, the strongly Democratic Senate unanimously passed a bill from the Republican legislature, SB 14, to toughen penalties for repeated sex trafficking of minors.

Sex trafficking is now considered a non-serious crime. SB 14 would officially classify it as serious if children are peddled.

The importance of labeling it a serious crime is that it subjects the criminal to California’s three-strike law, which can significantly extend jail time for repeat offenders.

The bill made such sense that all 40 senators voted for it. In fact, both sides agreed not to even bother with a floor debate and roll call vote. The measure was placed on what has been called the assent calendar, the soft landing ground for bipartisan bills so uncontroversial that dozens are routinely passed en masse at once.

That was made possible because its author, Senator Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), compromised with the Democrats and amended the bill to apply only to the trafficking of children under the age of 18. She originally wanted the tougher penalties to apply to all sex trafficking, regardless of the age of the victims.

Next stop: The Assembly Public Safety Committee. And there the bill seemed to die until its Speaker, Councilman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), was shaken awake by Newsom, Rivas and many angry voters.

For years, that committee has been a deathbed for aggravating bills. Recent examples: An aggravating measure for rape of a minor with a developmental disability. Another for fentanyl dealers if the user is seriously injured by the drug.

Opponents of harsher sentences tend to cling adamantly to the principle that longer prison sentences are wrong because it can overload lockups and does so disproportionately to people of color.

They fly the banner of penal reform, refusing to accept the idea that reform is possible, while still acknowledging, for example, that career pimps should pay a higher price for their evil and should not be free to prey on children.

I’ve heard opposition about black Californians being disproportionately harmed by three strikes, Odessa Perkins of Bakersfield told the Assembly Committee last week.

But I am here to say that I have been repeatedly abused and raped by black and white men and even some women. So the race doesn’t matter. What matters is saving our children. Traffickers get out of prison early and reoffend, continuing the horrific cycle of abuse and depravity.

Perkins, who is black, has been tested

That

she was victimized as a small child: touched, cared for. Then I started being forced to have sex with a grown man, then a bunch of unquoted uncles. Then I was traded to the highest bidder drug dealers. But what you see now is a survivor.

Members of the Democratic Committee were unaffected. They dodged a vote. The bill needed five yes votes to move forward and only got two from the panels’ lone Republicans.

Crime stupid, says Democratic political adviser Steve Maviglio. Voters get furious when the [crime punishment] The pendulum swings too far in the other direction and politicians become too lenient. Right now people are on edge.

Some of these people have a different moral compass, Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper told me, referring to his former colleagues in the legislature. This account was easy.

Before he was elected sheriff, Cooper was

like it

a moderate Democratic MP who tried to push through several crime laws and, he says, couldn’t even get a committee hearing.

In the current legislature, he argues, victims’ issues don’t matter.

Sex trafficking is important to Newsom. The governor called Grove to express his disappointment. And he called Rivas to urge the speaker to intervene. At a Democratic caucus meeting, Rivas stated that the embarrassing situation needed to be resolved.

Quick, the public safety committee

kicked back kicked back

. In a meeting that lasted only an instant, the panel voted 6

Unpleasant

0 to revive the account and send it to the Credit Committee.

Jones-Sawyer voted in favor of the measure for the second time. But he says an amendment is still needed to ensure that victims who are forced to help traffickers are not subject to the harsher penalties.

Grove told me that she has sufficiently amended the bill. Forty senators didn’t think more amendments were needed, she says.

Jones-Sawyer also notes that underage sex traffickers can already face sentences of 15 years to life in prison if force, coercion or violence are involved. But that’s often hard to prove, argue the proponents of bills.

It’s incomprehensible to me that we don’t call child trafficking a serious crime in California, says retired Alameda.

Co Province

distance attentive Nancy OMalley, a Democrat.

People are shocked. That’s why lawmakers got the pushback.

Like baseball, politics is essentially a simple game. If too many voters are pushed back, you lose.