Shannon Grove, a Republican, represents California’s 12th State Senate District, covering Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties. A U.S. Army veteran who served three years in Germany, she co-founded and serves as CEO of Continental Labor and Staffing Resources, a staffing company she started with her sister-in-law in 1993. She was the first woman veteran elected to the California Legislature, serving in the Assembly from 2010 to 2016 before winning a State Senate seat in 2018 and moving to her current redrawn district in 2022; she served as Senate Republican Caucus Leader from 2019 until being ousted by her own caucus in 2021.
Grove has focused much of her legislative work on combating human trafficking, authoring SB 14, which made sex trafficking of a minor a “serious” strike offense under California’s Three Strikes law; the bill passed unanimously with 60 co-authors in 2023 after Assembly Democrats initially blocked it in committee, drawing public backlash before they reversed course. She has drawn criticism at points in her career, including a 2015 remark linking the end of a Texas drought to anti-abortion legislation, and a 2021 claim, later disputed, that Senate Democrats had added sexually explicit content to a grade-school sex-education curriculum.
