Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón was supposed to close out this year’s legislative session with a signature win. Instead, she ended it having to defend a deal that fell apart in its final hours — and, according to colleagues, that may say more about her leadership style than any bill that passed.
After weeks of negotiations and at least one all-night bargaining session, Limón’s office had helped broker a wildfire liability agreement that backers said would protect fire victims while still holding utility companies accountable when their equipment sparks catastrophic blazes. The Senate had held firm against Gov. Gavin Newsom for months, refusing to budge on how the costs of wildfires should be shared and reduced for utility companies.
Then the deal collapsed.
In a chaotic hour-long meeting on the final morning of session — after the legislative deadline had technically passed — Assembly leaders walked away from the framework Limón had negotiated with Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and the governor’s office. Rivas said the agreement didn’t deliver “the relief, the accountability or the meaningful reform that Californians deserve.” Utility workers and electric industry lobbyists had spent days mounting an aggressive campaign against the plan.
Shortly after the Assembly rejected the deal, Limón told reporters the Senate had the votes to pass it anyway.
“There’s certainly a sense of disappointment,” she said, standing alongside seven fellow senators she encouraged reporters to question directly.
Since her colleagues chose the Santa Barbara Democrat to lead the chamber last summer, one thing has become clear: Limón wants attention on her caucus, not on herself.
Interviews with current and former lawmakers and staffers describe a leader who has deliberately avoided a top-down management style. Unlike her predecessor, Sen. Mike McGuire — whom many members and staffers privately described as a micromanager — Limón has taken the slower route of building consensus, giving individual senators more ownership over issues they care about personally.
She didn’t end the session with a marquee victory to point to. But in her first year as pro tem, Limón made incremental but real progress on thorny issues including new tax proposals and reforms to sexual assault liability law, while shielding her caucus from several politically dangerous votes pushed by the governor’s office.
And even though a difficult budget year threatened to splinter the caucus and test the limits of her consensus-driven approach, Limón’s biggest wins this year came largely from keeping her members unified — even when that meant clashing with Newsom.
“Our ability to get things done isn’t based on just one, two, three or four members,” Limón said in an interview with CalMatters. “I think it’s really about the caucus itself.”
For some of her colleagues, even the failed wildfire deal counted as a kind of win.
“We didn’t come across as being unable to make a decision,” said Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat. “We were unified in the decision we made, and we stuck to it.”
Navigating a tight budget
Limón entered the year facing the possibility of a session dominated by infighting, given the state’s grim budget outlook and the long list of priorities competing for limited dollars.
Newsom’s budget proposal leaned heavily on capturing windfall revenue tied to artificial intelligence and shoring up the state’s reserve fund. New taxes to offset federal cuts and address the state’s longer-term revenue gaps seemed unlikely, given Newsom’s presidential ambitions and the Legislature’s own desire to lower the cost of living for Californians ahead of upcoming elections.
Even so, Limón and her caucus pushed forward with a new tax proposal known as the “fair share” plan, which would require large corporations with significant numbers of employees enrolled in Medi-Cal to pay a payroll tax to help cover those workers’ health care costs.
Sen. John Laird, whom Limón tapped to chair the budget committee, said the caucus coalesced around the idea during a two-day budget retreat in early spring. The Senate’s budget plan, released in April, included the tax. A month later, Newsom signaled openness to new revenue sources. From there, Laird said, Limón and Senate Democrats pushed the Assembly to at least study the concept.
The Legislature ultimately passed Senate Bill 177, a scaled-back version that ordered a study on how the state could implement such a tax, which Newsom signed in July. Limón’s team still counted it as a win: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra endorsed the tax proposal and pledged to implement it if elected.
“She brought a unified caucus to the negotiating table, and I think she showed real skill in navigating all the differences within the caucus to reach one unified position,” Laird said.
Sen. Eloise Gómez-Reyes, one of five women of color serving as budget subcommittee leaders under Laird, credited some of that collaborative spirit to the number of women in leadership roles this year.
“I’ll tell you, when we first got together, when we looked around at each other, we said, ‘This is wonderful,'” she said of the budget leadership team.
Laird noted that as a member of Limón’s leadership team and the Rules Committee — which oversees the Senate’s internal operations and bill assignments — he often found himself in rooms filled mostly with women. He pointed out that he graduated college before the first woman was ever elected to the state Senate, in 1976. The chamber reached gender parity in 2024 and has maintained it since.
“This isn’t one white guy running everything,” Laird said. “There’s diversity in the caucus, and everybody sees that in the leadership and in how all the Democratic senators are included.”
Committed to justice for victims
Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Pasadena Democrat who represents fire-ravaged Altadena, said she was glad Limón included her on the Senate’s wildfire liability working group.
California’s three largest investor-owned utilities — powerful players in state politics — have aggressively lobbied Newsom to reduce what they must pay when their equipment causes wildfires. The companies pushed to ban subrogation, the practice that allows insurers to recoup claim payments from the parties responsible for a disaster, including utilities.
Limón, who previously advocated for survivors of the 2018 Thomas Fire in her own district, told Pérez she wanted to make sure victims remained the central focus of whatever policy the Senate ultimately supported.
“I recognize that wasn’t something she had to do,” Pérez said. “So it definitely meant a lot to me, and to my constituents as well.”
Pérez said Limón took time to meet with hundreds of Altadena residents who traveled to Sacramento to voice frustration over the governor’s proposal to roll back subrogation rights and cap non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, for fire victims. At victims’ urging, the Senate succeeded in stripping both of those controversial provisions from the deal.
Limón similarly prioritized including survivors of sexual assault in discussions between the two chambers over how the state should help cash-strapped local governments and school districts facing lawsuits from people who say they were assaulted as children by employees of those institutions.
Menjivar said Limón appointed her to the working group addressing sexual assault liability in part because of her background as a social worker. Representing Los Angeles County — which has paid roughly $5 billion to victims — puts Menjivar’s district at the center of the issue. When the Senate tried to negotiate a deal on rising costs last year, Menjivar was one of five senators, including Limón, who opposed the plan because it too severely limited victims’ rights.
While cities, counties and school districts wanted to cap the amount victims could recover in damages, victim advocates argued that any cap amounted to putting a price tag on their abuse. Limón and Senate Democrats largely sided with victims and refused to accept any plan that included damage caps. Those caps were left out of the final agreement, which also introduced new strategies and safeguards aimed at preventing child sexual abuse.
“Listening to the most vulnerable people, the ones without special interest funding behind them, showed incredible strength as a leader,” said Chantel Johnson, an advocate for youth in foster care and the justice system at the Youth Law Center. “We definitely could have been left out.”
Standing up to the governor
Over the summer, Limón made the unusual choice to stay publicly silent on two controversial parole board commissioners whom Newsom had reappointed after they approved the release of men convicted of sexually abusing children in the 1990s — a move that largely slipped past both the press and Republican lawmakers.
The approach spared Senate Democrats from having to cast politically unpopular confirmation votes and effectively ended the careers of two veteran parole board members without a formal rejection. Criminal justice advocates said the maneuver further politicized the process. Newsom’s office declined to comment on the decision.
Limón’s office also gave local lawmakers room to push back on other gubernatorial priorities, including the tech billionaire-backed California Forever proposal for a shipyard in Solano County, and a proposed environmental exemption for a Santa Monica developer. Both efforts collapsed in the final hours of last month’s session.
Outgoing Senate Republican leader Brian Jones of San Diego said Limón has taken a firmer stance against the governor than her predecessors did.
Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones said, “the Legislature just kind of got run over by the governor, so to speak.” This year, he said, lawmakers knew what the governor’s priority bills were, but many of them “never got done.”
Sen. Roger Niello of Roseville, the incoming Republican leader, said Limón is well-regarded across party lines and remains consistently accessible to hear out the GOP’s perspective.
Looking ahead, Limón said the biggest challenge she anticipates is knowing when the time is right to step aside and hand the gavel to a new pro tem — a transition that can either be carefully planned or turn into an abrupt ouster. All state lawmakers face 12-year term limits, and Limón’s tenure runs through 2028.
“A leader has to know when it’s time to make a change,” she said.
Original source: CalMatters
