Amber Maltbie

The defining image of the 2020 Legislative year in California was Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks giving a floor speech in the last hours while holding a month-old baby.

Attorney Amber R. Maltbie has a different, but related, memory of Wicks. They appeared together at a news conference nearly two years earlier to introduce a bill allowing candidates to spend campaign funds on childcare.

“I believe it was Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks who shared this story about how when she got elected in 2018, she was told she was the 160th woman in the history of the California Legislature,” said Maltbie, a partner is Nossaman’s Public Policy practice group in Los Angeles.

AB 220, now state law, was designed to remove a barrier some said made it harder for some women to run for office. Maltbie testified in support of the bill in both the Senate and the Assembly.

“I was surprised at how vigorously the male members of the committee supported the bill,” Maltbie told The Daily Journal. She quickly added, “The millennial men.”

Electing women is something Maltbie has thought about a lot as a board member with Emerge California, an organization that trains Democratic women to run for public office. There were just 26 women among the 120 members of the California Legislature in 2017, a 20-year low. But Wicks was part of a group that raised that number to 37 after the 2018 election; 34 of them voted for AB 220.

Maltbie hopes for more in November. There are 72 women among the 200 general election candidates; 14 races feature two women.

“I view that as a positive thing, so many women running for office that you have only women running in a race,” she said.

Prior to passing the bar in 2009, Maltbie worked as a communications director in the Assembly and as an advisor to Rep. Barbara Lee. She also teaches election law at her alma mater, McGeorge School of Law.

Working in political law in California can often mean Democrats suing each other. In 2018, she represented Democratic challenger Dave Jones when he sued incumbent Attorney General Xavier Becerra over the use of the 3rd District Court of Appeals’ Sacramento courtroom in an ad. Jones v. Becerra, BC707549 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed May 18, 2018).

But her focus goes far beyond the Golden State. This past summer, Maltbie helped pass Medicaid expansion initiatives in Missouri and Oklahoma. Not only are these both traditional red states, supporters kept both campaigns alive during the pandemic.

“Those efforts were still in the signature gathering phase when the pandemic made it impossible to gather signatures,” Maltbie said. “The pandemic really wreaked havoc on a lot of campaigns.”

— Malcolm Maclachlan