Today Governor Schwarzenegger becomes only the second governor since the Depression to have IOUs issued on his watch. Today he has abdicated his fiscal responsibilities and effectively turns California's finances over to Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Controller John Chiang.

Small businesses, students, seniors, and taxpayers will all start receiving IOUS....

This week I mark the one-year anniversary of being sworn in as Speaker of the California State Assembly. And what a year it has been. Clearly, the overwhelming challenge in the past year has been to keep California going in the face of the brutal national and international economic recession.

California urgently needs health care reform, and I applaud President Obama for holding this important summit and for including health care reform in his budget proposal.

California has the highest number of uninsured in the nation -- 6.6 million people, more than 20% of our population. We have a 10.1%...

The California budget approved last week by the legislature and signed by the governor is tough medicine and hard to swallow. But with our state on the edge of a fiscal cliff, it had to be done.

Without this budget, hundreds of infrastructure projects would have been stopped, which...

As I wrote in an article appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle today, this week is a perfect embodiment of the African principle of Sankofa. Sankofa is the principle -- symbolized by a bird looking backward while it walks forward -- that says we have to reclaim our past in...