A California Democrat just said what her party didn't want to hear.
State Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman took to the Senate floor and torched her own party's soft-on-crime agenda, declaring she was finished protecting the men who buy and abuse children.
"I'd like to say as a progressive, proud member of this body for the last 12 years, I'm done. I'm done with us protecting people who would buy and abuse our children," Eggman said during the debate. "I don't want to send more black and brown men to prison. I don't want more people in prison, but I don't want people buying girls. I don't want people buying little girls anymore. I'm tired of saying it's okay and that we have to protect the men who do it."
The moment came during debate over SB 1414, authored by Republican State Senator Shannon Grove — a bill to make the purchase or solicitation of a minor for commercial sex a felony in California. Under the state's then-current law, buying or soliciting sex from a child was treated as a mere misdemeanor: as little as two days in jail, up to a year, and a $10,000 fine. The bill aimed to force offenders into two to four years in state prison and onto the sex offender registry.
But fellow Democrats on the Public Safety Committee watered the bill down — limiting the felony classification to victims under 16 — over concerns about saddling younger offenders with permanent records. Eggman wasn't having it.
"I am not arguing that we open the gates to flood our prisons with people, but I am arguing that we have a moral responsibility to say, 'Enough, enough,'" she said. "We have given away enough on this area and we've got to move back into the center or we all look like fools and laughingstocks."
The speech was remarkable because of who gave it: not a Republican, but a self-described progressive Democrat from Stockton, breaking ranks in public to call out her own side. The Senate ultimately passed the bill unanimously, 36-0.
Eggman's rebuke landed because it named the thing her party wouldn't: that in the name of criminal justice reform, California had been going easy on the customers — the men paying to abuse children — while the children paid the price.
She said she was done. The question is whether her party heard her.