For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “I love when people would say, ‘This can’t be done…. It will be impossible.’ The more they said those things the more excited I got because I love danger.”
Former Gov. Schwarzenegger, talking to a jammed media lunch on his tenure
- New Assembly Speaker Appoints Leadership Team – Surprises Even a Few Allies
- Fixing Mental Health System – Newsom Tries to Finish What Reagan Started; $6.4-Billion Bond on March Ballot
- Environmentalists Disappointed in Governor: “We Were Expecting a Very Different Administration”
- Schwarzenegger Draws Big Media Crowd in Sacramento Reunion
- ICYMI: DeSantis v. Newsom Debate…“They came, they saw, they yelled at each other. A lot.”
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING DEC. 1, 2023
New Assembly Speaker Appoints Leadership Team – Surprises Even a Few Allies
Sacramento Bee & Politico’s California Playbook
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas is shaking up the lower chamber – and removing one of his close allies from a key position.
A holiday week leadership reorganization includes the ouster of Assemblymember Isaac Bryan as majority leader. The move was the biggest surprise in a broad overhaul that marks the first major display of power in the Rivas era — and unmistakably a downgrade of Bryan, an ambitious pol who had talked up his close ties to the speaker.
Bryan will now head the Natural Resources committee. Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry ascends from speaker pro tempore to take over as majority leader. Assemblymember Jim Wood shifts into the speaker pro tempore spot.
Shortly after the new assignments dropped, lobbyists in the Capitol pointed out that Bryan had been talking up his power as majority leader in Los Angeles circles, going so far as to brand himself as the “Speaker for LA” at a virtual meet-and-greet with the LA County Business Federation earlier this year, an episode that was recapped in a newsletter to members of the organization.
“My brother Speaker Rivas is really one of my best friends. But he’s not from here,” Bryan is quoted as saying in the BizFed newsletter.
After the announcement became public last week, Bryan appeared to take a veiled shot at the speaker by noting that his formal leadership ranks now were without a Black member.
Bryan in a statement said “it’s up to those of us who were vital in uplifting” Rivas to enact his “vision,” adding “that “Black Californians who now see no representation” in Rivas’ leadership team are “certainly not absent leaders.”
Bryan, an early and fervent Rivas supporter, hasn’t been coy about his own speakership ambitions. He told Playbook earlier this year that he had approached former Speaker Anthony Rendon about a shot at the top job shortly after his election to the Legislature, and that he had been considering his own bid before Rivas made his move.
Rivas’ office insists that Bryan is not being punished.
They contended his previous role had been part of a temporary transition team — meant to shepherd the body through the end of the year — and that he remains an important part of the speaker’s team.
“Everyone always knew this was a transition team and there would be changes to leadership,” Rivas’ Director of Communications Nick Miller said. “Isaac is a tremendous leader and continues to be part of the speaker’s leadership team.”
Miller added that the speaker is proud that every Assembly Black Legislative Caucus member returning after the 2024 session is “in a powerful and tremendously impactful leadership position, chairing key committees, including budget subcommittees, Health, Transportation, Natural Resources and Public Safety.”
Majority leader is a major role, and whoever holds the position is often seen as an extension of the speaker’s office, making Bryan’s transition to a committee chair a conspicuous change as Rivas heads into his first full term leading the lower chamber.
Rivas also gave prime positions to two other top allies: He appointed Jesse Gabriel as head of the powerful budget committee and Buffy Wicks as chair of the appropriations committee.
Other notable changes included installing Mia Bonta as health chair, and Kevin McCarty as chair of the public safety committee.
Here’s the breakdown of the new committee chairs:
- Appropriations:Wicks
- Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Tourism:Mike Gipson
- Budget:Gabriel
- Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials:Eduardo Garcia
- Governmental organization:Blanca Rubio
- Health:Bonta
- Housing and Community Development:Chris Ward
- Human Services:Alex Lee
- Judiciary:Ash Kalra
- Labor and Employment:Liz Ortega
- Natural Resources:Bryan
- Privacy and Consumer Protection:Rebecca Bauer-Kahan
- Public Safety:McCarty
- Rules:Blanca Pacheco
- Transportation:Lori Wilson
- Utilities and Energy:Cottie Petrie-Norris
- Water, Parks and Wildlife:Diane Papan
Politico
Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to finish the job Ronald Reagan started more than half a century ago as he seeks to transform California’s mental health system — even if it means forcing some people into treatment.
In the last few months, the state established a court intervention program for people with severe mental illness and passed a law making it easier for relatives and first responders to send people to mandatory treatment.
The biggest potential development will be up to voters: In March, they’ll decide on a $6.4 billion bond proposal Newsom has pitched as part of his plan to build nearly 25,000 psychiatric and addiction beds statewide.
Taken together, Newsom is billing the changes as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally set up the services and systems promised during the Reagan era to replace the giant mental hospitals of the bad old days, when thousands of people were thrown into institutions against their will. The ambitious Democrat is embracing the unlikely goal of building on a bedrock legacy of the conservative icon.
But woven through the overhaul are new ways to compel people into care — and new facilities to house them. Civil rights and mental health advocates fear these changes, advanced amid mounting political pressure to curb homelessness, open drug use and untreated mental illness, will turn back the clock.
“Are we risking institutionalizing people because we have nowhere else to put them?” said Rachel Bhagwat, a legislative advocate for the ACLU California Action, which has lobbied California lawmakers against expanding compelled care.
A similar shift is playing out in Democratic strongholds throughout the country, from Seattle to New York City to Portland, Oregon, as leaders respond to a dramatic rise in homelessness that has made the lack of mental health services highly visible in recent years.
But California — which has become the face of those problems with over 100,000 people living on the streets — is the first state where a Democratic governor has pushed such sweeping changes. Home to 12 percent of the country’s population, California accounts for half of the people living on the streets nationwide.
Newsom’s plan reflects a striking tack to the center for California Democrats, who have taken harder lines on homeless encampments. Cities like San Diego have adopted policies including ticketing or arresting those who refuse to leave — a step that anyone on the left would have been loath to deploy just a few years ago.
Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, is constantly asked to answer for images of addiction and disease on the streets of the city’s downtown, and those questions will only get louder if — as widely anticipated — he runs for president in 2028.
Newsom has framed his approach as a course correction decades after the country — starting when Reagan was governor in the 1960s and peaking in the 1980s during his presidency — emptied psychiatric facilities without ensuring the patients received the care or housing they needed.
California alone warehoused 22,000 patients in the 1960s.
“There was a righteousness in the ‘60s, with Democrats and Republicans saying, ‘We have to move away from these locked institutions,’” Newsom said this year before he signed a pair of mental health bills. “We were supposed to replicate that with community-based care and there was no accountability, there was no obligation either way.”
The governor stresses that the bulk of the new services will be voluntary — and will provide shelter to thousands of people ailing on the streets. His bond proposal, combined with three other programs he’s rolled out recently, is expected to fund almost 46,000 outpatient treatment slots.
Today, California has only a vague idea of how many people it can treat in outpatient settings — just that it’s not enough. That number could include slots in group therapy, detox, counseling or a host of other methods that don’t require a license and are hard to count. That’s part of the need for changes, officials say, to finally get a census of where the state is on treatment.
It’s going to require a massive workforce to provide all the treatment the state is promising. Newsom’s proposal includes around $7 billion to beef up the workforce, which will rely on new medical education slots to supply practitioners, as well as people who have been trained as counselors after receiving substance abuse treatment themselves.
“I know critics will say you don’t have the workforce so you can’t change the laws,” said state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton), who wrote one of the laws that will appear on the March ballot. “For mental health care, we seem to think everything has to be existing in its perfect environment before we can make any kind of changes.”
The fact that California is building new treatment facilities and training more staff on this scale is a feat unlike what other states are doing, California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly said in an interview. The idea is to strengthen the entire spectrum of care, including with prevention and early interventions.
“But it doesn’t obviate the need for some folks whose conditions become so severe, potentially so violent, so difficult to manage, that they do need some level of involuntary care,” Ghaly said. “The California vision for this is, is that [involuntary treatment] is only used when absolutely necessary.”
Still, the bond measure allows some of the money for residential treatment to be used to build secure psychiatric facilities. California has also made it easier to put people into conservatorships, an arrangement that allows judges to appoint someone to make legal and health decisions for people they deem “gravely disabled” and unable to care for their health and safety.
Compelled care, for some, will mean involuntary holds in a psychiatric facility ranging from 24 hours to evaluate a person to 180 days in extreme cases to treat them. Court-ordered treatment plans may include medication, therapy or a housing placement.
Some mental health advocates fear Newsom is overcorrecting. “We’re looking at all of this, and it’s going in the wrong direction,” said Clare Cortright, policy director for Cal Voices, a coalition of groups that represents community mental health organizations. These groups and others have organized into Californians Against Proposition 1, to oppose the changes on the March ballot. With no professional organization or high-dollar backers, the opposition’s main asset is outrage from people in the mental health system who fear they’ll be funneled into involuntary treatment.
The idea of forcing people into treatment had long been politically untenable for progressive Democrats, who saw it as a civil rights infringement. Until recently, few state lawmakers were willing to call for more conservatorships or court-mandated services outside the justice system — and California’s recent laws reflect a painstaking attempt at balancing such measures with civil rights concerns.
But Democratic mayors of cities in the grips of housing and addiction problems have started loosening or changing laws around civil commitments, in which people living on the street who are unable to care for themselves are given court-ordered treatment plans. Some argue governments need a way to reach people who can’t or won’t seek help on their own.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law this year doubling the length of time people can be held in hospitals against their wills. In Seattle, City Councilmember Sara Nelson is considering expanding the city’s involuntary commitment laws for people with untreated mental health or substance abuse disorders. And San Francisco Mayor London Breed has pitched a proposal to tie local welfare grants to treatment.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, the architect of the nearly 20-year-old mental health law Newsom wants to change, has emerged as a prominent champion of the changes Newsom has proposed — often speaking on behalf of other big-city mayors on the frontlines of California’s homelessness crisis.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has also been a vocal proponent, particularly for California’s new statewide civil court for people with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, a Newsom initiative that has begun to operate in a number of counties and will soon launch in Los Angeles. That program, called CARE Courts, may include compelled treatment. Civil rights groups have sued to block the program and the case is ongoing.
Over 80 percent of homeless people in the state report they’ve experienced a serious mental health condition, and two-thirds have struggled with alcohol or drugs. The fentanyl epidemic has created a spike in overdose deaths, with nearly 6,000 dying from fentanyl overdoses alone in California in 2021.
Newsom often invokes the year 1967, when Reagan, then governor, started emptying the state’s large mental institutions in favor of less restrictive care. Most of the money saved by closing hospitals was supposed to go to community treatment. But creating a new treatment system didn’t prove as politically popular as dismantling the old one.
“There was a guy named Ronald Reagan in 1967 — the year of my birth — with good intention and a bipartisan piece of legislation,” Newsom said when he announced his most recent proposal.
“But here we have the opportunity to reimagine and to advance that original vision.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/29/newsom-mental-health-policies-00128613
Environmentalists Disappointed in Governor:
“We Were Expecting a Very Different Administration”
Sacramento Bee
Gov. Gavin Newsom has been positioning himself as a global climate leader this year, evangelizing California environmentalism in China and at the United Nations.
But at home, he is increasingly at loggerheads with leading environmentalists. Environmental groups and tribes say the governor’s plan to protect water supply from climate change will exacerbate existing ecological devastation and irreversibly damage the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the central hub of the state’s water system.
While this relationship has been fraying for years, a new fault line opened this month when Newsom used newfound authority to fast track approval for the largest proposed piece of concrete water infrastructure to be built by the state in decades.
“We were expecting a very different administration. He was an extremely environmentally focused mayor in San Francisco and we were expecting something similar,” said Barry Nelson, a longtime analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council now representing the Golden State Salmon Association.
The Bee talked to nearly a dozen leading advocates and experts on California water. Many give credit to Newsom on other issues, but share the belief that his water policies fall short of their expectations.
Questions put to the governor’s office on water strategy were referred to Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot. He said the administration has aimed to break from traditional conflict-ridden water policy debates, but disagreement is inevitable.
He also highlighted Newsom’s support for dam removal on the Klamath and Eel rivers. “While we want to bring everybody along, we have a responsibility to ensure that we have water supplies for Californians,” Crowfoot said. “At the end of the day, we have to provide a balanced approach and that’s what we’re doing.”
Environmentalists are acutely concerned with the beleaguered delta, a massive estuary that draws together California’s major rivers and feeds giant pumps that ship water south to cities and farms.
Newsom’s sweeping 2022 water strategy, which includes programs such as safe drinking water to communities and water recycling, has sparked specific criticism for his support for three major proposals related to the Bay-Delta watershed and Sacramento Valley.
Those proposals: Negotiated agreements with major water agencies to relinquish supplies voluntarily, instead of regulations for minimum flows through the delta; a controversial proposal to build a tunnel to transport water from the Sacramento River beneath the delta; and the plan to build Sites Reservoir in a valley north of Sacramento.
In the governor’s framing, his approach is meant to address the strains of climate change on water supply. But environmental advocates warn his plan won’t protect the delta’s deteriorating ecosystem or ensure that a sufficient amount of water pass through, threatening disaster for the local farming economy, Native American communities and threatened and endangered fish — from salmon and steelhead to green sturgeon and delta smelt.
Opposition to Newsom’s tunnel project among state lawmakers almost tanked a budget deal last summer when he tried unsuccessfully to include it in a last-minute infrastructure law, SB 249.
The law allows the governor to pick projects for judicial streamlining. Environmental challenges in court have to be limited to 270 days. Groups such as Friends of the River, Tell the Dam Truth and Patagonia also urged against Newsom’s selection of Sites Reservoir for streamlining under the law, citing research that decomposing organic matter underneath the reservoir could also emit 362,000 metric tons of methane emissions despite the project’s branding as “green infrastructure.”
“Do we need a really expensive new reservoir that won’t provide very much water and has all these negative impacts?” asked Keiko Mertz, policy director for Friends of the River. “The answer is clearly no. We should be saving taxpayer dollars.”
Several leading environmental advocates said the Newsom administration has turned a deaf ear to groups representing communities and stakeholders that would face negative impacts from the proposed “voluntary agreements,” as well as Sites and delta tunnel projects.
Barry Nelson, the former NRDC analyst, compared Newsom’s strategy on California water supply to that of late California senator Dianne Feinstein, who developed a reputation for closely aligning with Central Valley farmers.
“Newsom’s strategy is the Feinstein strategy on steroids,” Nelson said. “One of her staffers once said to me, ‘The senator is going to earn her environmental credibility on forestry and desert issues and offshore oil, but her water policies would reflect the desire of Central Valley agriculture.’”
Natural Resources Secretary Crowfoot called the notion “wholly inaccurate,” citing a $300 million-a-year commitment made by Newsom in his first year in office to safe drinking water for low-income communities in the Central Valley.
“We have to adjust our system for climate change,” Crowfoot said. “At the end of the day, there are groups and leaders on all sides of California water that will criticize a balanced approach, but it’s not going to change our focus.”
For its part, Sites Reservoir has completed the environmental review process and must receive a water right from the State Water Resources Control Board before moving forward. That public hearing is expected next year.
Andrew Rypel, a fisheries biologist and sturgeon expert at UC Davis, said celebrating dams coming down on the Eel River one week and celebrating the construction of Sites Reservoir the next is a strategy riddled with mixed messages.
“Is Sites going to result in more or less water being exported from the river? I think the answer is more,” Rypel said. “And is that going to help or hurt native fish? Probably hurt them.”
Last month, the water board laid out long-awaited options for new water quality standards in the delta that included Newsom’s voluntary agreements proposal, which a coalition of statewide water agencies support.
Jerry Brown, executive director of the quasi-governmental agency Sites Project Authority, said around 17% of storage within the reservoir will be dedicated for environmental purposes including distributing flow through the Yolo bypass and other nature reserves. “Any water supply project has pluses and minuses,” Brown said. “Is there going to be water to fill this storage project? All of the research that I’ve reviewed says yes there will be.”
The debate over Sites, the tunnels and Bay-Delta plan also coincides with a civil rights investigation by the federal Environmental Protection Agency after tribes and environmental justice groups accused the state water board of discrimination and mismanagement that have contributed to the delta’s ecological deterioration.
“The State Water Board really shouldn’t be proceeding with approving any of these major infrastructure projects until the water quality standards in the delta are sufficiently updated,” said Stephanie Safdi, an attorney who filed the complaint and lecturer at Stanford Law.
“They set the amount of flow needed to create a sustainable ecosystem that’s also going to support thriving tribes.” The water board is holding meetings and workshops on the Bay-Delta Plan, and will post future water rights hearing information on the Sites Reservoir project.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article282230423.html#storylink=cpy
Schwarzenegger Draws Big Media Crowd in Sacramento Reunion
LA Times commentary from George Skelton
Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to Sacramento recently and reminded us of a beneficial trait he possesses that is sorely lacking in today’s polarized politics: an upbeat attitude.
There’s currently too much bellowing, blaming and belligerence — and hatred — to make democracy work productively the way the republic’s founders intended.
True, it’s easier to be upbeat when you’re super rich and a global celebrity — one who has soared to the top in three competitive ventures: bodybuilding, movies and politics.
Conversely, being upbeat and an eternal optimist throughout life surely is a major reason why Schwarzenegger, 76, rose to the top of the heap, accumulating stardom, wealth and power.
It made him an extraordinarily interesting moderate Republican governor for seven years — not always successful, but constantly trying and bold.
I was reminded of Schwarzenegger’s value to the political world when he came back to the state capital to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his swearing-in as governor on Nov. 17, 2003, having ousted Democrat Gray Davis in a unique recall election.
Right here I’ll admit to a pro-Schwarzenegger bias regarding one matter: his positive, practical relationship with the news media.
That doesn’t mean he was treated gently in the press. Coverage was often hard-hitting. The Times exposed allegations that he groped women right before the recall election. As governor, Schwarzenegger was criticized in print for his fiscal policies, calling Democratic legislators “girlie men” and reducing the manslaughter sentence of a Democratic ally’s son.
But he chose the Sacramento Press Club to host one of two inaugural anniversary celebrations. He did an hourlong Q-and-A session during a sold-out luncheon. A later evening reception attended by hundreds was organized by alumni of the Schwarzenegger administration.
Asking the Press Club to host a luncheon for him enabled the organization to sell tickets and raise several thousand dollars for its scholarship fund to help college journalism students.
That was Schwarzenegger’s pattern as governor. Each January, he would speak to a sold-out Press Club luncheon, pitching his legislative agenda and raising thousands of dollars for journalism scholarships.
But not his successors: Democrats Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom.
Brown appeared only once in eight years. Newsom never has, although he seemingly jumps at every opportunity to appear on national TV. It wouldn’t matter except that he’s denying journalism students thousands of dollars in scholarship money.
“I would not be sitting here today if it weren’t for the press,” Schwarzenegger replied when veteran political writer Carla Marinucci, the luncheon Q&A moderator, asked him how he viewed his news coverage as governor.
What he meant was that whether it was in bodybuilding, movie acting or being governor, if journalists had not informed the public about him, he would not have become a household name. He’d have been like the proverbial giant tree falling in the isolated forest.
“I had a great relationship with the press after I became governor,” he said. “I’m a happy camper.”
After Arnold Schwarzenegger won the recall election to become California governor in 2003, Gov. Gray Davis showed him the governor’s private office at the Capitol in Sacramento. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Unlike so many politicians, particularly MAGA Republicans, Schwarzenegger did not habitually accuse reporters of prejudicial coverage or spreading “fake news” — even when they took his hide off.
That’s one example of his upbeat, sunny personality, a trait that applied to his governing generally.
“It was the best seven years of my life without any doubt,” he told the Press Club.
But his “anything’s possible” belief led to both good and bad decisions.
“I loved — I mean loved — challenges,” he told the luncheon crowd. “And I love when people would say, ‘This can’t be done…. It will be impossible….’
“The more they said those things the more excited I got because I love danger. I hate a boring life, which I call ‘existing.’ I love living fully with the dangers and the failures and the successes.”
Schwarzenegger wouldn’t listen to people he called “naysayers.”
OK, that can be admirable but it’s a dangerous two-edged sword. The naysayers were usually experienced political and government hands trying to give the novice practical advice.
Sage advice such as don’t call a special election to push a package of wide-ranging so-called reforms that had weak support. The governor did anyway in 2005 and was uncharacteristically humiliated when voters rejected his measures in a landslide.
“I got the message,” Schwarzenegger said afterward.
The governor got it so well that the next year he promoted $37 billion in infrastructure bonds that voters readily approved.
Schwarzenegger’s persistence gained voter approval of a vital political reform: ending the Legislature’s gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts.
But the optimist often over-promised and couldn’t deliver, as when he vowed to “tear up the credit cards,” “end the crazy deficit spending” and “live within our means.” It was a pleasant dream.
Schwarzenegger was self-confident enough that he didn’t bow to his party’s base, unlike most politicians. Hollywood’s action hero famously spoke the truth to a Republican state convention in 2007, admonishing that “we are dying at the box office. We are not filling the seats.”
He warned that the GOP could win in California only by “expanding into the center, not falling back upon ourselves into a smaller and smaller corner.”
The GOP regarded Schwarzenegger as a heretic naysayer and retreated into a much smaller corner.
Now “we need new blood” in political leadership, he told the Press Club. “New energy, a new way of looking at [problems].” He cited Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Ronald Reagan as the “fresh blood” of their eras.
But Schwarzenegger insisted he wasn’t criticizing President Biden.
As for former President Trump: “Look, I don’t want to comment now on every single stupid thing that he says [or I’ll] be sitting here for the next eight days.”
Schwarzenegger has never left any doubt that he’d run for president if he could. The native Austrian is barred because he wasn’t born in the United States.
“I’m not going to complain about it,” he said. “Because every single thing that I’ve accomplished in my life is because of America.”
American politics could use more of Schwarzenegger’s upbeat swagger.
ICYMI: DeSantis v. Newsom Debate…
“They came, they saw, they yelled at each other. A lot.”
CalMatters
Somewhere in the 100 or so minutes of crosstalk and insults last night was Fox News’ heavily-promoted “The Great Red vs. Blue State Debate” between Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Touted by moderator Sean Hannity as a contest of ideas — an opportunity to sort through two clashing governing philosophies that have come to define this divided country — the event wound up more of a verbal smackdown, with both DeSantis and Newsom at one point accusing the other of being a bully.
“What are we actually doing here?” Newsom asked rhetorically early in the night. It was likely a question on many viewers’ minds as Hannity, begging not to be the “hall monitor,” repeatedly tried to cut through the jumble of shouting to urge his participants to let each other speak.
The answer would be made clear before the telecast was over, when Hannity, finally turning the presidential campaign subtext of the whole affair into text, prodded Newsom: “Will you say, unequivocally, under no circumstances are you running?”
Here are five key moments from the bitter, pugnacious, downright messy showdown:
It’s no coincidence that the head-to-head format — DeSantis and Newsom standing at lecterns in a television studio in Alpharetta, Georgia, sans live audience — resembled a presidential debate, underscoring the high stakes for a man now seeking the most powerful office in the land and another widely touted as a future contender.
The implications of the event were far more immediately significant for DeSantis, who hoped that a knockout performance could rescue his floundering campaign for president. Once a serious threat to the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, former President Donald Trump, DeSantis has sharply faded in public polls with less than two months until the first contest in Iowa and now risks falling into third place behind former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Many pundits were surprised when DeSantis accepted Newsom’s debate challenge in August, pitting him against someone who is not even in the presidential race. But lacking opportunities to face off directly against Trump, who has refused to participate in the GOP primary debates, DeSantis aimed to show Republican voters that he is best-equipped to take on Democratic President Joe Biden in the general election.
“What Biden would do, the people around him, they would look to California for the model to go forward in the next four years. That would accelerate the decline of this country,” DeSantis said tonight. “The failures need to be left in the dustbin of history.”
Newsom has repeatedly denied his own White House ambitions and instead become a top surrogate for Biden’s re-election, appearing on his behalf in the spin room at a GOP debate in Southern California this fall. Yet the governor’s increasingly national lens, positioning himself as a Democratic spokesperson, carries all the hallmarks of a politician eyeing higher office; this year he embarked on a “red-state tour” to boost Democrats in conservative communities and introduced a constitutional amendment on gun control.
The Hannity debate gave Newsom another opportunity to introduce himself to a broader audience that has not been following his work in California — and, perhaps most valuably, to redefine himself for conservative and moderate voters who watch Fox News and could be crucial to winning swing states in a presidential election.
Even as he once again shot down any notion that he was running a “shadow campaign” for the Democratic nomination — “I don’t know how many times I can say it,” Newsom told Hannity, “Joe Biden will be our nominee in a matter of weeks” — the very suggestion presented Newsom as someone who could be a legitimate candidate for the job.
Before the debate, Newsom warned that it would be a two-on-one pile-on, with Hannity and DeSantis teaming up to make their liberal foe look bad.
In the end, he wasn’t wrong. Though Hannity promised to serve as an impartial moderator, he framed most of the questions by highlighting something that he believed was wrong with California — high taxes, high gas prices, bad schools – and asking Newsom to defend it.
A typical exchange: Fox News displayed a graphic showing the violent crime rate in California is higher than the national average and nearly twice that of Florida. (These rates are based on FBI data collected voluntarily from local law enforcement agencies, about half of which did not report in Florida.)
“How do you explain that when safety and security, I would argue, is a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness?” Hannity asked.
Newsom tried to flip the question onto DeSantis, pointing out that Florida has far higher incidences of murder and gun violence than California, where gun control laws are much stricter.
“Maybe spend a little more time back in your home state and address the murder and gun violence in your own backyard,” Newsom said.
DeSantis, who filmed a campaign ad in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood this summer lamenting its widespread drug use and homelessness, said “public safety has collapsed” in California.
“In a lot of these places in California, everything’s under lock and key because they’ve basically legalized retail theft,” he said. “They have chosen in California to put the interests of the criminals over public safety.”
The debate took almost no time to get personal, and was at moments simply nasty. DeSantis noted early on that Newsom’s own in-laws had relocated to Florida. Newsom later referred to DeSantis as “weak, pathetic and small.”
But nothing seemed to bring out the animosity between the two governors quite like the coronavirus pandemic, which came up on multiple occasions during the telecast.
DeSantis criticized California’s strict lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus, contrasting his own decision to reopen businesses and schools much sooner in Florida. He said Newsom “did huge damage to people” by shutting down the economy while he ate dinner at the French Laundry and should apologize for keeping students out of classrooms while his own children returned to their private school.
“The only person who should apologize is Ron DeSantis for the tens of thousands of lives that died unnecessarily because he played to the fringe of his party,” Newsom responded, referring to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows more Floridians died per capita from COVID-19 than Californians.
The conversation devolved into another shouting match when Newsom brought up that DeSantis threatened a $27.5 million fine against the Special Olympics last year unless they dropped their coronavirus vaccine requirement for athletes. The organization, which runs athletic competitions for disabled people, eventually reversed course.
“They were discriminating against the athletes,” DeSantis said. “You’re a liberal elite. You wanted them to be ostracized.”
“You attack vulnerable communities,” Newsom replied. “You’re nothing but a bully. I understand that intimidating and humiliating people, that’s your calling card.”
Newsom delighted throughout the debate in needling DeSantis about his sinking support in the presidential race, even urging DeSantis at the end to drop out and give Haley a better shot to stop Trump.
He seemed determined to deliver a fatal blow during a segment on abortion, which Democrats hope will be a key issue in the 2024 election after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion last year and which Republicans have taken pains to downplay on the campaign trail.
In the week before the debate, Newsom put an ad on television in Florida highlighting a law that DeSantis signed this year banning abortion after six weeks. The spot accuses his Republican rival of criminalizing women who seek the procedure and doctors who perform it.
“Will you or will you not support a national ban if it lands on your desk?” Newsom asked tonight of a hypothetical DeSantis presidency. DeSantis repeatedly ducked the question, before Newsom turned straight to camera to speak to the viewers at home.
“He will sign that extreme six-week national ban,” Newsom said. “The American people should know that.”
Yes, a poop map. As the debate drew to a close, DeSantis actually whipped out a printout purportedly from a user-generated app tracking human feces found on the streets of San Francisco.
It was intended to be his knockout punch at Newsom on the issue of California’s spiraling homelessness crisis, which he said has gotten so bad that “human feces is now a fact of life” for residents. DeSantis blamed Democrats’ lax attitude.
“You have the freedom to defecate in public in California,” DeSantis said. “You have the freedom to pitch a tent on Sunset Boulevard. You have the freedom to create a homeless encampment under a freeway and even light it on fire.”
“They’re not the freedoms our founding fathers envisioned,” he added, “but they have contributed to the destruction of the quality of life in California.”