Sen. Monique Limón may not have a signature legislative triumph to point to after her first year leading the California Senate, but ask around the Capitol and colleagues will tell you her real accomplishment has been something harder to legislate: keeping her caucus together.
The Santa Barbara Democrat, who took over as Senate President Pro Tem last summer, closed out her first legislative session without the marquee win her team had hoped for. A wildfire liability deal she spent weeks negotiating with Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Gov. Gavin Newsom collapsed in the final hours of the session, after utility companies and their allied labor unions launched an intense lobbying push against it. Rivas ultimately pulled the plug, saying the agreement failed to deliver real accountability or relief for wildfire survivors.
Even so, Limón emerged from the wreckage with her standing among Senate Democrats largely intact — a notable feat given how contentious the negotiations had become. Minutes after the deal fell apart, she stood before reporters flanked by seven caucus members and calmly noted that the Senate had the votes to pass the measure had the Assembly not walked away.
“There certainly is a sense of disappointment,” she said, before turning the microphone over to her colleagues.
That gesture, according to lawmakers and staff who spoke with CalMatters, captures much of what has defined Limón’s leadership style over the past year: a preference for sharing credit — and blame — rather than dominating the spotlight herself.
Interviews with current and former legislators and Capitol staff describe a marked contrast between Limón and her predecessor, Sen. Mike McGuire, who was known in Capitol circles as a hands-on, often controlling leader. Limón, by comparison, has taken a slower, more collaborative approach, building consensus among her members and giving individual senators more latitude on issues close to their hearts.
The strategy was tested early. Limón took the gavel amid a bleak budget outlook, with Newsom’s spending plan focused on capitalizing on artificial intelligence tax revenue and building up reserves rather than expanding programs. Passing any new tax seemed unlikely, especially with Newsom weighing a presidential run and lawmakers eager to ease the state’s cost-of-living burden ahead of an election year.
Yet Limón’s caucus pushed forward anyway, rallying behind what became known as the “fair share plan” — a proposal to tax large corporations that rely heavily on Medi-Cal to cover their employees’ health care. Sen. John Laird of Santa Cruz, whom Limón tapped to chair the Senate Budget Committee, said the idea gained traction during an early spring retreat and made its way into the Senate’s budget proposal by April. A month later, Newsom signaled he might be open to new revenue streams, giving Limón an opening to press Assembly leaders to at least study the concept.
The final product, Senate Bill 177, was far more modest than the original idea — a study of how such a tax could work — but Limón’s team considered it a foothold. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra has since embraced the concept, pledging to pursue it if elected.
“She took a united caucus into the negotiations,” Laird said. “It was a high level of skill that navigated all the differences to get to a unified position.”
Sen. Eloise Gómez-Reyes, one of several women of color who chair budget subcommittees under Laird, said the caucus’s collaborative tone owes something to the makeup of Senate leadership itself. Laird, one of the few men in those closed-door budget meetings, noted that the Senate reached gender parity in 2024 — a milestone unimaginable when he was in college, decades before California elected its first woman to the chamber.
“It’s not a white guy herding everybody around,” Laird said. “There’s diversity in the caucus, and everybody sees it in the leadership.”
Limón also made a point of centering the concerns of wildfire and sexual abuse survivors in some of the session’s thorniest negotiations. Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez of Pasadena, whose district includes fire-ravaged Altadena, said she was struck by how Limón made time to meet with hundreds of Altadena residents who traveled to Sacramento to voice opposition to Newsom’s proposal to limit insurers’ ability to recover wildfire costs from utilities and cap certain damages for victims. Those provisions were ultimately stripped from the deal at residents’ urging — the same deal that later collapsed in the Assembly.
“I recognize that that was not something she needed to do,” Pérez said. “It meant a lot to me, and it’s meant a lot to my constituents too.”
A similar dynamic played out in negotiations over how the state should help school districts and local governments facing lawsuits from people who say they were sexually abused as children by public employees. Sen. Caroline Menjivar of Van Nuys, who works as a social worker and represents a Los Angeles County district that has already paid nearly $5 billion to survivors, helped lead that effort for Limón. Menjivar had broken with Senate leadership last year over an earlier proposal she felt did too little to protect survivors’ rights.
This time, Limón and most of her caucus rejected any deal that would cap damages for survivors — a red line for advocates who argued that any cap effectively put a price on abuse. The final agreement, signed into law, left those caps out and added new prevention measures.
“To listen to the people that were the most vulnerable and had no special interest funding really just showed incredible strength as a leader,” said Chantel Johnson, an advocate with the Youth Law Center who works with foster and justice-involved youth.
Limón also proved willing to quietly push back against the governor on other fronts. She declined to bring up for confirmation two parole board commissioners reappointed by Newsom after they approved the release of men convicted of sexually abusing children in the 1990s — a low-profile move that spared Senate Democrats an uncomfortable vote while effectively ending both commissioners’ tenures. Criminal justice advocates said the maneuver further politicized the parole process; Newsom’s office declined to comment.
She similarly gave local lawmakers room to oppose other Newsom-backed priorities, including a Solano County shipbuilding proposal tied to the California Forever development group and a contested environmental exemption sought by a Santa Monica developer. Both efforts died in the closing days of the session.
Outgoing Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones of San Diego said Limón has pushed back against the governor more firmly than her recent predecessors. During the pandemic years, he said, “the Legislature just let the governor lead them around by their noses, so to speak.” This year was different, he said — lawmakers knew which of Newsom’s priorities were coming, and several simply “never came” to fruition.
Incoming Senate Republican Leader Roger Niello of Roseville said Limón has earned respect across party lines, describing her as consistently “accessible” even to the minority party. His only concern going forward, he said, is how gracefully she’ll eventually hand off the gavel. All state lawmakers face 12-year term limits, and Limón’s tenure in the Senate is set to end in 2028.
“A leader has to know when it’s time to change,” Niello said.
Original source: CalMatters
