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Column: Has Trump just repeated the P.R. disaster that cost Herbert Hoover his reelection?

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Column: Has Trump just repeated the P.R. disaster that cost Herbert Hoover his reelection?

“Well, Felix, this elects me.”

The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was at home in Albany with his friend and advisor Felix Frankfurter, monitoring radio reports of a political disaster unfolding in Herbert Hoover’s Washington.

It was 1932. Hoover had dispatched the military to break up a camp of World War I veterans who had massed to demand immediate payment of a bonus they had been promised for serving. News of the cavalry’s gassing and trampling of civilians — the slain including an infant born during the nationwide march of the so-called Bonus Army — would dominate the front pages and tar Hoover’s public image through the presidential campaign.

Flash forward 92-plus years to Donald Trump’s rally Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a bleak, lurid festival of racist hate and profane vituperation so vile that even fellow Republicans, who have turned a blind eye to Trump’s character for years, are distancing themselves from the event.

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Their fear may be that with this heavily promoted event, the fundamental loathsomeness of Trump’s political persona and behavior may break through to the undecided voters he needs to win reelection.

The occasion evokes the line sometimes attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Mark Twain that “History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” For the attack on the Bonus Army and the Madison Square Garden rally share features that could bind them together as campaign turning points.

As Twain might have acknowledged, the comparison isn’t perfect — among other differences, the Bonus Army attack occurred on July 28, 1932, in the middle of the presidential campaign, while the Trump rally came only 10 days before election day and after early voting by mail and in person has already started in many states. Trump threatens to turning the military on American citizens to quell demonstrations; Hoover actually did so.

But the events do rhyme. Let’s take a look.

Start with the main characters. Hoover and Trump became president after winning their first campaigns for elective office, and both entered the White House as wealthy men. The similarities end there, however.

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Hoover had made a name for himself in public service. During World War I he had served as chair of the Belgian Relief Commission, which shipped food to that German-occupied nation, and subsequently as head of the U.S. Food Administration, which aimed to keep food prices stable while the U.S. participated in the war. After war’s end, he became director of the American Relief Commission, which provided food relief to the war-torn countries of Europe.

Hoover served as Commerce Secretary for Warren Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge — in which role he oversaw the interstate negotiations that would clear the way for construction of the great dam that would bear his name. Trump’s public service prior to his election as president was nonexistent.

Well, Felix, this elects me.

— Franklin Roosevelt to Felix Frankfurter, upon hearing of Hoover’s attack on the Bonus Army

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The two came to their wealth by different paths. Hoover was a self-made man, having earned a degree in engineering as a member of the first graduating class of Stanford University and making a fortune as a mining engineer. Trump inherited his wealth from his father, a real estate developer.

Hoover, like Trump, saw himself as a savior of the nation. “He has wrapped himself in the belief,” his secretary of state, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary, “that the state of the country really depended on his reelection.” Trump often claims to be the only person who can save America from war and economic depression. Neither, obviously, saw themselves clearly.

On the Democratic side, Roosevelt and Kamala Harris were scorned by critics as intellectual lightweights, despite having had successful careers in government — Roosevelt as a New York state senator, assistant Navy secretary under Woodrow Wilson, and governor of New York; Harris as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. senator and vice president.

Despite that, FDR was disdained by former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as having “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Walter Lippmann, the reigning public intellectual of his era, deprecated FDR as “a highly impressionable person, without a firm grasp of public affairs. … A pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

Trump and his cohorts incessantly demean Harris as — to quote the ever-fading Tucker Carlson at the Sunday Trump rally — a “low-IQ former California prosecutor.”

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The Republican Parties of 1932 and 2024 were fragmented entities when they nominated their presidential candidates.

Hoover had proven during his term to be a technocrat utterly without political skills. GOP insurgents (led by Harold Ickes, who would go on to serve FDR as interior secretary) had mounted a “dump Hoover” movement at their national convention; it collapsed for lack of a candidate to take up the colors.

Trump prevailed at the 2024 GOP convention, though not without challenges from candidates fearful of his lack of appeal outside a core right-wing base — former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley collected a strong 40% of the vote in a series of primaries, but not enough to carry her to the nomination.

That brings us to what might be the turning points in both Republican campaigns.

For Hoover, it was his response to the Bonus Army. This was a national movement for early payment of a stipend Congress had voted for veterans of the war at a cost of up to $4 billion — but which was not scheduled to be redeemed until 1945. Veterans could borrow from the government against their bonus certifications, but only at a high rate of interest.

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As the Depression tightened its grip on the nation in 1931 and amid soaring unemployment and the spread of shantytowns of dispossessed Americans known as “Hoovervilles,” veterans began to gather in Washington, uncorking fears of civil disorder.

Among their targets was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was steadfast against early redemption. (Among Mellon’s grandchildren is Timothy Mellon, who is the largest individual contributor to the Trump campaign and other Republicans in this election cycle.)

The Bonus Expeditionary Force, as the Bonus marchers called themselves, originated in Portland, Ore., with an unemployed ex-sergeant named Walter W. Waters as its commander. They started to move east — “hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and babies … walking, hitchhiking, hopping freights,” as Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen reported in their 2004 book about the Bonus Army.

Most of the marchers fell away en route, but by the end of June a Hooverville-like camp housing as many as 15,000 bedraggled men and their families had sprung up in the desolate, muddy Anacostia Flats area of Washington. They were fed with donated food, treated at a medical clinic set up on the grounds, and mounted a series of marches to Capitol Hill, where a bill to accelerate the bonus payments to the present day was being debated. (It passed the House but was defeated in the Senate.)

Hoover and his aides became progressively more fretful about the settlement at Anacostia Flats, especially when its organizers began to talk about making it permanent. There was talk about its having been infiltrated by Communists and rumors of planned violence. Hoover decided early in July to have the marchers evicted and placed the responsibility in the hands of the Army chief of staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

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MacArthur assumed the task of deploying tanks, bayonets and tear gas on fellow citizens enthusiastically, calling the camp residents “insurrectionists.” The prospect appalled MacArthur’s adjutant, Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed later that he tried to convince his superior that the job was beneath someone of his rank. MacArthur rebuffed him.

On July 28, the attack began, including cavalry troops under the command of Major George S. Patton. Two veterans were killed in the operation and 55 injured. A 12-week-old baby died after being tear-gassed. The tent camp in Anacostia was burned to the ground.

The following day, Hoover issued a statement explaining that he had acted to prevent the government from being “coerced by mob rule.” He kept petulantly defending his actions to the end of his life. In his memoirs he accused the Democrats of distorting the event, implying “that I had murdered veterans on the streets of Washington.” He charged that the Bonus march had been largely “organized and promoted by the Communists and included a large number of hoodlums and ex-convicts.”

As it happened, Roosevelt as president was no more willing to pay the bonus early than Hoover and Mellon had been. In 1936, Congress overwhelmingly passed a measure to pay the bonus immediately — over FDR’s veto.

The ramifications of the Bonus Army attack live on. It set the stage for the creation of a vast administrative infrastructure of aid for service members and veterans, starting with enactment of the GI Bill, which paid for tuition, textbooks and supplies (and $50 a month for living expenses) to grant returning veterans a college education, making American society into a meritocracy.

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The bill was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in June 1944, a couple of weeks after allied troops cross the English channel on D-Day.

It also stands as a warning for Trump that taking military action against civilians will inspire a massive public backlash, which in that case contributed — no one can say how much — to Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide defeat of Hoover just over three months later. Roosevelt’s presidency established a new principle in American politics through the New Deal, that government exists to succor all its people, not just the wealthy.

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See the Countries Under Trump’s New Travel Ban: List, Map and Charts

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See the Countries Under Trump’s New Travel Ban: List, Map and Charts

President Trump has targeted the citizens of a dozen countries as part of a new ban on travel to the United States and restricted travel for those from several more countries.

The restrictions touch more parts of the world and could affect more people than similar travel bans that were introduced during the first Trump administration.

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All travelers who are citizens of countries in the first tier will be barred entry, while certain types of visas will be suspended for those countries in the second tier.

Shortly after he first took office in 2017, Mr. Trump tried to bar travelers from seven mostly Muslim-majority countries. Five of those countries are on the new list, plus several more countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as well as Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela.

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Mr. Trump’s order says the new travel ban does not apply to people with visas who are already in the United States, and it contains a few other exceptions. For example, Afghans eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa program, which is for those who helped the U.S. government during the war in Afghanistan, are excepted from the ban.

How many people come to the U.S. from these countries?

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Last year, the State Department issued about 170,000 total visas to the 12 countries on the ban list. For most countries, the vast majority of those were nonimmigrant visitor visas for tourism, business or study. But for Afghans, Yemenis and Somalians, most were immigrant visas, typically allocated to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or to skilled workers who are sponsored by their employers.

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Visas previously issued to countries now on the travel ban list

Permanent immigrant and temporary nonimmigrant visas issued in 2024

What happened under the previous travel bans?

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The introduction of the 2017 travel ban led to immediate chaos and confusion as hundreds of travelers were detained at airports across the country and more than 60,000 visas were provisionally revoked. Federal judges blocked the ban within a week.

Overall, travel from the countries banned in 2017 was relatively low to begin with, though people from Iran and Syria had arrived in the thousands each month. A back-and-forth in the courts delayed implementation, and then the Covid pandemic hit, halting travel globally.

But after January 2021, when President Biden lifted the bans, travel from many of those countries, most notably Iran, more than rebounded.

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Travel to the U.S. from countries barred under 2017 travel ban

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International visitor arrivals by country of citizenship

Mr. Trump ended up issuing four travel bans in his first term, with each version modifying its predecessor in order to pass legal scrutiny. It was almost a year before any ban actually took effect.

Here is a look back at the evolution of the travel bans under the first Trump administration from 2017 through 2020:

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Jan. 27, 2017

First travel ban introduced. Entry into the U.S. is barred for people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days.

Feb. 3, 2017

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A federal judge temporarily blocks the ban in Washington v. Trump.

Mar. 6, 2017

Second travel ban introduced. Iraq is removed from the list. The ban also exempts those with an existing green card or valid visa.

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Mar. 15, 2017

Two federal judges block core provisions of the ban, ruling that the most important section — banning travel from half a dozen countries — could not be enforced.

Sept. 24, 2017

Third travel ban introduced. Entry is barred for most citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. Iranian nationals with valid student and exchange visitor visas are allowed entry. Several parties sue to block the ban.

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Dec. 4, 2017

The Supreme Court allows the third ban to take effect while legal challenges against it continue.

April 10, 2018

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Travel restrictions on Chad are removed after the country satisfies the administration’s security concerns.

June 26, 2018

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 to uphold the third travel ban, saying the president has authority over national security concerns relating to immigration.

Jan. 31, 2020

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Fourth travel ban introduced. Immigrants from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania are barred from entering the United States, but tourists and others entering on a temporary basis are not.

Jan. 20, 2021

President Biden takes office and immediately revokes all of the Trump travel bans.

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Trump orders Attorney General to investigate Biden's autopen use amid cognitive decline concerns

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Trump orders Attorney General to investigate Biden's autopen use amid cognitive decline concerns

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

President Donald Trump called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead an investigation into whether certain individuals working for former President Joe Biden conspired to deceive the public about his mental state while also exercising his presidential responsibilities by using an autopen.

In a memo on Wednesday, Trump said the president of the U.S. has a tremendous amount of power and responsibility through the signature. Not only can the signature turn words into laws of the land, but it also appoints individuals to some of the highest positions in government, creates or eliminates national policies and allows prisoners to go free.

“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” Trump wrote. “This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”

He continued, saying Biden had suffered from “serious cognitive decline” for years, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently concluded that Biden should not stand trial, despite clear evidence he broke the law, because of his mental state.

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EXCLUSIVE: COMER HAILS DOJ’S BIDEN PROBE AS HOUSE INVESTIGATION HEATS UP

President Trump called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to launch an investigation into whether former President Biden’s team used an autopen and covered up the former president’s cognitive decline. (Trump: Reuters / Autopen: AP)

“Biden’s cognitive issues and apparent mental decline during his presidency were even ‘worse’ in private, and those closest to him ‘tried to hide it’ from the public,” Trump said. “To do so, Biden’s advisors during his years in office severely restricted his news conferences and media appearances, and they scripted his conversations with lawmakers, government officials, and donors, all to cover up his inability to discharge his duties.”

Still, during the Biden presidency, the White House issued over 1,200 Presidential documents, appointed 235 judges to the federal bench and issued more pardons and commutations than any administration in U.S. history, Trump said.

The president wrote about Biden’s decision just two days before Christmas 2024, to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 most dangerous criminals on federal death row, including mass murderers and child killers.

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TRUMP SAYS BIDEN DIDN’T FAVOR HIS ADMIN’S LAX BORDER SECURITY POLICY, SUGGESTS AUTOPEN PLAYED A ROLE

Joe Biden

A new book describes President Joe Biden’s cabinet meetings as “scripted” and “uncomfortable.”  (Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Care Can’t Wait Action)

“Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the President, there are serious doubts as to the decision-making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions being taken in his name,” Trump wrote. “The vast majority of Biden’s executive actions were signed using a mechanical signature pen, often called an autopen, as opposed to Biden’s own hand. This was especially true of actions taken during the second half of his Presidency, when his cognitive decline had apparently become even more clear to those working most closely with him.

“Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise his Presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name,” he added.

TRUMP HAS NOT DIRECTED ADMIN TO DECLASSIFY BIDEN DOCS ON HEALTH ‘COVER-UP’

President-elect Donald Trump and President Joe Biden at Trump's 2025 inauguration

President-elect Donald Trump shakes hands with U.S. President Joe Biden at Trump’s inauguration in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC (Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images)

The memo goes on to call for an investigation that addresses if certain individuals, who are not named in the document, conspired to deceive the American public about the former president’s mental state and “unconstitutionally” exercised the president’s authority and responsibilities.

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Specifically, Trump called on the attorney general’s investigation to look at any activity that purposefully shielded the public from information about Biden’s mental and physical health; any agreements between his aides to falsely deem recorded videos of Biden’s cognitive ability as fake; and any agreements between Biden’s aides to require false, public statements that elevated the president’s capabilities.

The investigation will also look at which policy documents the autopen was used for, including clemency grants, executive orders, and presidential memoranda, as well as who directed Biden’s signature to be affixed to those documents.

Trump said last week that he thinks Biden did not really agree with many of his administration’s lax border security policies, instead suggesting that those surrounding the former president took advantage of his declining faculties and utilized the autopen to pass radical directives pertaining to the border.

House Republicans, led by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, launched an investigation earlier last month aimed at determining whether Biden, who was in declining health during the final months of his presidency, was mentally fit to authorize the use of the autopen. Comer said last week he was “open” to dragging Biden before the House to answer questions about the matter if necessary. 

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Biden released a statement later Wednesday, deriding Trump’s investigation as a “distraction.” 

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” Biden said. “This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.” 

Fox News Digital’s Alec Schemmel and Bradford Betz contributed to this report.

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California broke law in cutting rooftop solar incentives, state Supreme Court is told

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California broke law in cutting rooftop solar incentives, state Supreme Court is told

The California Public Utilities Commission failed to abide by state law when it slashed financial incentives for residential rooftop solar panels in 2022, environmental groups argued before the California Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The commission’s policy, which took effect in April 2023, cut the value of the credits that panel owners receive for sending power they don’t need to the electric grid by as much as 80%.

In arguments before the court, the environmental groups said the decision has stymied efforts to get homeowners and businesses to install the climate-friendly panels.

The commission violated state law, the groups argued, by not considering all the benefits of the solar panels in its decision and by not ensuring that rooftop solar systems could continue to expand in disadvantaged communities.

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More than 2 million solar systems sit on the roofs of homes, businesses and schools in California — more than any other state. Environmentalists say that number must increase if the state is to meet its goal set by a 2018 law of using only carbon-free energy by 2045.

On the other side of the courtroom battle were lawyers from Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office, arguing that the commission’s five members, all pointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, had followed the law in making their decision.

In briefs filed before Wednesday’s oral arguments, the government lawyers sided with those from the state’s three big for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Mica Moore, deputy solicitor general, said at the hearing in downtown Los Angeles that the credits given to the rooftop panel owners on their electric bill have become so valuable that they were resulting in “a cost shift” of billions of dollars to those who do not own the panels. This was raising electric bills, she said, especially hurting low-income electric customers.

The credits for the energy sent by the rooftop systems to the grid are valued at the retail rate for electricity, which has risen fast as the commissioners have voted in recent years to approve rate increases the utilities have requested.

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The environmental groups and other critics of the commission’s decision have argued that there is no “cost shift.” They say that the commission failed to consider in its calculations the many benefits of the rooftop solar panels, including how they lower the amount of transmission lines and other infrastructure the utilities need to build.

“The cost shift narrative is a red herring,” argued plaintiffs’ attorney Malinda Dickenson, representing the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group and the Protect Our Communities Foundation.

Moore countered by saying the commission doesn’t have to consider all the possible societal or private benefits of the rooftop panels.

For example, even though the rooftop panels could result in conserving land that was otherwise needed for industrial scale solar farms, the government lawyers argued in their brief, the commission was not obligated to consider that value in its calculation of the amount of costs the rooftop panels shift to other customers.

The government lawyers also said the commission had created other programs beyond the electric bill credits to help disadvantaged communities afford the solar systems.

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The utilities have long complained that electric bills have been rising because owners of the rooftop solar panels are not paying their fair share of the fixed costs required to maintain the electric grid.

During the oral arguments, the seven justices focused on a legal question of whether a state appeals court erred when it ruled in January 2024 against the environmental groups and said that the court must defer to how the commission interpreted the law because it had more expertise in utility matters.

“This deferential standard of review leaves no basis for faulting the Commission’s work,” the appeals court concluded in its opinion.

The environmental groups argue the appeals court ignored a 1998 law that said the commission’s decisions should be held to the same standard of court review as those by other state agencies.

Moore told the seven justices that the appeals court had made the correct decision to defer to the commission.

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Not all justices seemed to agree with that.

“But we’re pretty good about figuring out what the law says,” Associate Justice Carol Corrigan said to Moore during the proceeding. “Why should we defer on that to the commission?”

The justices will weigh the arguments made by both sides and issue a decision in the next 90 days.

The big utilities have for decades tried to reduce the energy credits aimed at incentivizing Californians to invest in the solar panel systems that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The rooftop systems have cut into the utilities’ sale of electricity.

On another front, the state’s three big utilities are now lobbying in Sacramento to reduce credits for Californians who installed their panels before April 15, 2023. The commission’s decision in 2022 left the incentives in place for those panel owners for 20 years after their purchase.

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Early this year, Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier), a former Southern California Edison executive, introduced a bill that would have ended the program for all solar owners who installed their systems by April 2023 after 10 years. In face of opposition and protests by solar owners, Calderon amended the bill so it would end the program — where credits are valued at the retail electric rate — only for those selling their homes.

Calderon said the bill would save the state’s electric customers $2.5 billion over the next 18 years.

On Monday, Roderick Brewer, an Edison lobbyist, sent an email to Assemblymembers, urging them to vote for the bill known as AB 942. “Save Electricity Customers Billions, Promote Equity,” he urged in the email.

The Assembly voted 46 to 14 to approve the bill on Tuesday night, sending it to the state Senate for consideration.

The timing of the vote surprised opponents of the bill. They expected a vote late this week because of rules that allow more time for bills to be reviewed after they are amended. Calderon amended the bill late Monday.

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Nick Miller, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, said Calderon had asked for a waiver of the rules so that it could be voted on Tuesday night.

Such waivers, Miller said, are “not uncommon.”

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