California Assembly Minority Leader Heath Flora and Republican Caucus Chair Juan Alanis broke ranks with every other Republican in the chamber to vote yes on Senate Bill 762, a measure that would let roughly a dozen counties and cities raise sales taxes above the state's 2% cap. Their two votes supplied the exact margin Democrats needed for the required two-thirds supermajority, the New York Post reported.
Every other Republican in the Assembly voted no or abstained. The bill now awaits one more procedural vote in the California Senate before heading to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk.
The fallout inside the California GOP has been swift. Fellow Republican lawmakers, county party leaders, and the state's leading taxpayer advocacy group have all called out Flora and Alanis by name, and neither man has offered a public explanation for crossing the line on a tax vote.
Under existing California law, local governments face a 2% cap on sales tax increases. Cities and counties that want to exceed it must secure a special legislative exception from Sacramento. SB 762 would grant that exception to approximately a dozen localities at once, including Santa Barbara County, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz.
Democrats framed the bill as a way for local governments to offset federal health and human services cuts. But critics say the cap exists for a reason, and that legislators have been chipping away at it for years.
David Kline of the California Taxpayers Association told reporters the erosion has accelerated sharply.
"Every session there seems to be more and more bills to waive the 2% cap. We think that cap should be preserved, not abandoned."
Kline noted that parts of California already shoulder some of the highest combined sales tax burdens in the country. In Lancaster and Palmdale, total sales tax rates sit close to 12%. Los Angeles County previously voted to breach the 2% limit. Each new exception makes the next one easier to justify.
California residents already contend with a gas tax that keeps climbing, pushing pump prices further from the national average. Adding higher sales taxes on top of that compounds the squeeze on working families who can least afford it.
The math here is not ambiguous. SB 762 needed a two-thirds supermajority. Flora, who represents Ripon, and Alanis, who represents Modesto, delivered the precise margin. Without both of their votes, the bill would have failed.
That makes them the only Republicans in the chamber who chose to help Democrats raise taxes, and they happen to hold the two highest leadership positions in the Assembly Republican caucus.
The California Post reached out to the caucus for an explanation. No response was reported.
Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican from San Diego, had laid down a clear marker at a hearing weeks earlier:
"Now is not the time to raise taxes. Now is the time to do what every struggling family, every struggling small business has had to do, tighten the belt."
Flora and Alanis apparently disagreed, though neither has said so publicly.
For Heath Flora, the SB 762 vote lands on top of an already troubled political record. He cast a pivotal vote in 2017 to extend California's controversial cap-and-trade program, a move that drew sharp criticism from fiscal conservatives at the time. When the program came up for extension again last fall, Flora recorded no vote.
His personal conduct has also drawn scrutiny. Last October, Flora was found to have had an extramarital affair with a lobbyist, according to a Sacramento Bee report referenced in the coverage. Concerns have also been raised about whether he actually resides in his district.
The political consequences have been concrete. Republican Party committees in both San Joaquin County and Stanislaus County refused to endorse Flora's bid for a final two-year term. He was elected Assembly minority leader in the summer of 2025, but his standing with the grassroots has cratered.
In the June primary, Flora secured just 30.6% of the vote, the lowest percentage of any incumbent legislator in that election cycle. He advanced to the November runoff, but barely.
Joel Campos, chair of the Stanislaus County Republican Party, did not mince words about the situation.
"We're disappointed by our state assemblyman and hearing from constituents."
Campos cited a lack of response from Flora's office, a lack of presence in the district, and what he described as "a lack of support for Republicans" as reasons for withholding the endorsement. The SB 762 vote will not help Flora's case.
The broader pattern matters as much as the individual vote. The 2% sales tax cap was designed to prevent Sacramento from turning local tax policy into a free-for-all. But as Kline of the California Taxpayers Association explained, the cap has been gutted through a steady accumulation of one-off exceptions.
"They're getting a ton of bills to go past the cap. It used to be a solid cap, but in the last few years there have been many, many exemptions."
The result, Kline said plainly: "The cap isn't doing the job it was intended to do."
That is the real story behind SB 762. Each exception bill arrives dressed up as a narrow, local matter. But the cumulative effect is the same as repealing the cap entirely, just without the political cost of an honest, straightforward repeal vote. Democrats get to raise taxes piecemeal. And this time, two Republican leaders gave them cover to do it.
The broader Republican struggle in California makes episodes like this especially damaging. When the party's own legislative leaders vote like Democrats on the signature issue that separates the two parties, taxes, voters can be forgiven for wondering what the point of the Republican caucus is.
SB 762 still needs one procedural vote from the California Senate before it reaches Newsom. Whether the governor signs it remains an open question; he has not publicly signaled his intentions.
But the damage inside the GOP caucus is already done. The two men tasked with leading Assembly Republicans into the fall, the minority leader and the caucus chair, cast the decisive votes to hand Democrats a tax increase they could not have passed alone.
The California primary season has already been marked by chaos and controversy, from ballot-counting delays in Los Angeles to federal election fraud investigations tied to those delays. Republican voters in the state have enough to worry about without their own leaders handing the opposition legislative victories on tax policy.
Kline summed up the taxpayer group's position with a plea directed at the entire legislature:
"We have been consistently opposed to the many bills introduced to increase local taxes. We are hopeful that legislators will start opposing these bills because they are dramatically increasing the cost of living in California."
Flora and Alanis have not responded to requests for comment. Their silence speaks clearly enough. When Republican leaders refuse to explain why they voted to raise taxes, the explanation voters fill in on their own is rarely flattering.
A party that cannot hold the line on taxes in Sacramento has no line at all. Flora and Alanis just proved it.
