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Bills offer help to
homeless students

Re: “Homeless student numbers in California rising” (Page B1, July 9).

I read with interest the article regarding youth homelessness. This year, I authored two bills to help students experiencing homelessness.

In the 2022-23 school year, over 246,000 students in California experienced homelessness. Nearly 90,000 high school students were identified as homeless, including more than 24,000 12th graders. Too many young people who face homelessness struggle to access higher education, training and jobs.

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SB 685 will cover certain costs of attendance for homeless students, including housing and basic needs, at San Jose State and three other CSU campuses, so students can focus on their education and stay off the streets.

SB 33 will create the California Success, Opportunity and Academic Resilience (CalSOAR) Program to temporarily provide homeless high school seniors with $1,000 monthly upon graduation, building on guaranteed income programs we’ve started locally.

We’ve seen these programs work, offering dignity, empowerment and stability. So, let’s make ending youth homelessness a reality.

Dave Cortese
California state senator
San Jose

DA’s refusal to appeal
certainly seems political

Re: “DA’s death penalty views reflect county’s” and “Ex-DA’s letter confuses death penalty question” (Page A6, July 9).

The letters of Daniel Mayfield and Terence McCaffrey both missed the main point of former Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr’s article (“DA didn’t appeal death penalty ruling. Was it all about politics?” Page A6, July 3) in which she criticizes the recent decision of her successor, Jeff Rosen, not to appeal the Superior Court’s denial of his motion to reduce the death penalty of mass murderer Richard Farley to a life sentence.

Specifically, the anti-death penalty Sacramento politicos recently passed the statute, under which Rosen filed his motion, in such a completely unfair “heads I win, tails you lose” fashion that the only parties to Rosen’s motion were Rosen, who opposes the death penalty, and the mass murderer such that, if Rosen/Farley had won their motion, none of Farley’s victims could have appealed.

Carr wisely suggests that Rosen did not appeal his loss here because he does not want any appellate court to declare this new, highly dubious, “no adversaries” statute unconstitutional.

John Haggerty
Santa Clara

Democratic Party hasn’t
found winning message

I am concerned that the Democratic Party has yet to develop an approach to change the minds of those who do not like Donald Trump but like what the Democrats have to offer even less.

The truth is that the majority of the country did not see an alternative to this human wrecking ball that addressed their concerns about conditions in the United States. The Democrats have been unable to counter the ultra-right’s defining abortion and transgender issues as threats to the traditional family. They have been unable to offer a coherent immigration plan that brings reasonable control to our borders, that reduces the real stresses to states with large undocumented immigrant populations, and that acknowledges some issues with the foreign criminal element.

Waiting for people to hate Trump so much that they will vote Democratic is not a winning strategy.

Larry Lauro
San Jose

Column inflates scope
of Trump’s victory

Re: “Will political drift right last beyond 2024?” (Page A6, July 8).

OK, I get it. Dan Walters hates Gavin Newsom, Democrats in the state Legislature, and liberals, period. His one-note song grows tiresome, but his characterization of the 2024 election in his column deserves refutation.

He claims that Donald Trump “walloped Kamala Harris.” Let’s look at the facts. Trump’s popular vote margin of 1.47% ranks as the fourth closest in the last 20 presidential elections since 1948. Put another way, the margin of victory for Trump was the forty-fourth worst out of 51 presidential elections since 1824. The 229,766 vote difference combining the three swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have swung the election to Harris if this relatively small number of voters had chosen Harris instead.

That’s what Walters calls a walloping. A little biased, are we, Dan?

J. Dan Rothwell

Aptos