Our View: Vote for Ellis in 32nd District special primary
Four candidates appear on the Feb. 25 special primary ballot vying to fill the vacancy created when former 32nd District Assemblyman Vince Fong was elected last May to succeed Kevin McCarthy in Congress. Bakersfield's 20th District congressman, McCarthy, resigned his seat midterm in December 2023.
The candidates running to succeed Fong are Bakersfield entrepreneur Stan Ellis, a Republican; educator and Bakersfield City School District Board trustee Chris Cruz-Boone, a Democrat; and two political newcomers, author, educator and business owner Holli Willibey, a Republican; and social worker William Brown, a Libertarian.
Unanimously endorsed by the Kern County Republican Central Committee, Ellis is recognized for being an innovative businessman and philanthropist. He is the most uniquely qualified among the Assembly candidates. He should be elected to replace Fong.
Growing up on a South Dakota farm, Ellis worked his way through the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. After graduating with a degree in mathematics, Ellis took a job in 1975 as a 'mud engineer' in Kern's oil patch. He formed his first company, West Coast Mud, in 1982.
Eventually he branched out into the chemical process industry with his company Global Environmental, focusing on minimizing waste from oil refineries. With offices in Bakersfield, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Houston, Ellis would fly his Beechcraft King Air between locations to oversee operations.
In more recent years, he founded the quantum physics lab Qubitekk. The company is collaborating with the departments of Energy and Defense to advance cybersecurity in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ellis developed a radiation device to irradiate and mutate RNA to kill viruses.
An admitted science fanatic who holds several patents, Ellis believes he is the first U.S. manufacturer to work with quantum-entangled split protons. Ellis serves on Cal State Bakersfield's Engineering Advisory Board.
But Ellis hasn't lost his agricultural roots. He also owns a pistachio orchard, too.
Ellis is well-known for his interest in entertainment. He formerly owned the Bakersfield Jam basketball team and promoted mixed martial arts to Bakersfield audiences. On the side, he was the lead guitarist for the band Stampede, which performed at Bakersfield's Crystal Palace.
'I like the entertainment business,' Ellis told The Californian in a 2016 interview. 'I like watching people have a great time.'
His philanthropy includes a $250,000 donation he and his wife, Bonnie, made to Bakersfield Memorial Hospital to help construct the hospital's Children's Pavilion for Emergency Care.
His current 32nd District campaign has echoes of his campaign for the same post in 2006, when Bakersfield's long-time Congressman Bill Thomas was retiring and being replaced by his protégé, then 32nd District Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy.
Although Ellis at the time was well-known as a local businessman, he was not publicly well known. He spent nearly $500,000 of his own money to raise his name recognition, but still lost to Jean Fuller, who was then the superintendent of the Bakersfield City School District.
Asked by The Californian why he was competing in the 2006 race, Ellis credited his wife for encouraging him.
'I'm forever complaining at the TV about politicians and bureaucrats,' Ellis told The Californian in 2006. 'And my wife would say, 'Why don't you do something about it?''
Over the years, Ellis has not lost his fervor for going to Sacramento and making the legislative process more responsive to the needs of Kern County and the Central Valley.
The father of five adult children and 20 grandchildren, Ellis says he was motivated to run this year for the 32nd District seat 'by a profound sense of duty to future generations.'
If a candidate wins more than 50% of the votes in the Feb. 25 special primary election, he or she will be quickly sworn into the 32nd District Assembly seat. If no candidate wins a majority of votes, the top two vote-getters will compete in a special general election on April 29.
Ellis has a business and personal reputation for being a problem solver.
The California Legislature really needs a problem solver. Vote for Stan Ellis.
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Hamilton Spectator
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The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children from those lessons, but then reversed course because it found the opt-out policy to be disruptive. Sex education is the only area of instruction with an opt-out provision in the county's schools. The school district introduced the storybooks in 2022, with such titles as 'Prince and Knight' and 'Uncle Bobby's Wedding.' The case is one of several religious rights cases at the court this term. The justices have repeatedly endorsed claims of religious discrimination in recent years. The decision also comes amid increases in recent years in books being banned from public school and public libraries. A three-year battle over congressional districts in Louisiana is making its second trip to the Supreme Court Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since 2022 and the justices are weighing whether to send state lawmakers back to the map-drawing board for a third time. 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American Press
38 minutes ago
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Landry wants special session to revive controversial legislation that died
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
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What's left for the Supreme Court to decide? 21 cases, including state bans on transgender care
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is in the homestretch of a term that has lately been dominated by the Trump administration's emergency appeals of lower court orders seeking to slow President Donald Trump's efforts to remake the federal government. But the justices also have 21 cases to resolve that were argued between December and mid-May, including a push by Republican-led states to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors. One of the argued cases was an emergency appeal, the administration's bid to be allowed to enforce Trump's executive order denying birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents who are in the country illegally. The court typically aims to finish its work by the end of June. Here are some of the biggest remaining cases: Tennessee and 26 other states have enacted bans on certain treatment for transgender youth The oldest unresolved case, and arguably the term's biggest, stems from a challenge to Tennessee's law from transgender minors and their parents who argue that it is unconstitutional sex discrimination aimed at a vulnerable population. At arguments in December, the court's conservative majority seemed inclined to uphold the law, voicing skepticism of claims that it violates the 14th amendment's equal protection clause. The post-Civil War provision requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same. The court is weighing the case amid a range of other federal and state efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use. In April, Trump's administration sued Maine for not complying with the government's push to ban transgender athletes in girls sports. Trump also has sought to block federal spending on gender-affirming care for those under 19 and a conservative majority of justices allowed him to move forward with plans to oust transgender people from the U.S. military. Trump's birthright citizenship order has been blocked by lower courts The court rarely hears arguments over emergency appeals, but it took up the administration's plea to narrow orders that have prevented the citizenship changes from taking effect anywhere in the U.S. The issue before the justices is whether to limit the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have plagued both Republican and Democratic administrations in the past 10 years. These nationwide court orders have emerged as an important check on Trump's efforts and a source of mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies. At arguments last month, the court seemed intent on keeping a block on the citizenship restrictions while still looking for a way to scale back nationwide court orders. It was not clear what such a decision might look like, but a majority of the court expressed concerns about what would happen if the administration were allowed, even temporarily, to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally. Democratic-led states, immigrants and rights groups who sued over Trump's executive order argued that it would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than 125 years. The court seems likely to side with Maryland parents in a religious rights case over LGBTQ storybooks in public schools Parents in the Montgomery County school system, in suburban Washington, want to be able to pull their children out of lessons that use the storybooks, which the county added to the curriculum to better reflect the district's diversity. The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children from those lessons, but then reversed course because it found the opt-out policy to be disruptive. Sex education is the only area of instruction with an opt-out provision in the county's schools. The school district introduced the storybooks in 2022, with such titles as 'Prince and Knight' and 'Uncle Bobby's Wedding.' The case is one of several religious rights cases at the court this term. The justices have repeatedly endorsed claims of religious discrimination in recent years. The decision also comes amid increases in recent years in books being banned from public school and public libraries. A three-year battle over congressional districts in Louisiana is making its second trip to the Supreme Court Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since 2022 and the justices are weighing whether to send state lawmakers back to the map-drawing board for a third time. The case involves the interplay between race and politics in drawing political boundaries in front of a conservative-led court that has been skeptical of considerations of race in public life. At arguments in March, several of the court's conservative justices suggested they could vote to throw out the map and make it harder, if not impossible, to bring redistricting lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act. Before the court now is a map that created a second Black majority congressional district among Louisiana's six seats in the House of Representatives. The district elected a Black Democrat in 2024. A three-judge court found that the state relied too heavily on race in drawing the district, rejecting Louisiana's arguments that politics predominated, specifically the preservation of the seats of influential members of Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson. The Supreme Court ordered the challenged map to be used last year while the case went on. Lawmakers only drew that map after civil rights advocates won a court ruling that a map with one Black majority district likely violated the landmark voting rights law. The justices are weighing a Texas law aimed at blocking kids from seeing online pornography Texas is among more than a dozen states with age verification laws. The states argue the laws are necessary as smartphones have made access to online porn, including hardcore obscene material, almost instantaneous. The question for the court is whether the measure infringes on the constitutional rights of adults as well. The Free Speech Coalition, an adult-entertainment industry trade group, agrees that children shouldn't be seeing pornography. But it says the Texas law is written too broadly and wrongly affects adults by requiring them to submit personal identifying information online that is vulnerable to hacking or tracking. The justices appeared open to upholding the law, though they also could return it to a lower court for additional work. Some justices worried the lower court hadn't applied a strict enough legal standard in determining whether the Texas law and others like that could run afoul of the First Amendment.
