Newsom and Democrats play games with retail theft, fentanyl crises. It won’t work | Opinion

Californians woke up Monday morning a little less free. Less capable of sticking up for ourselves when our elected leaders won’t. Less able to trust in the government we elected to represent us.

How is that, you ask? Governor Gavin Newsom and legislative Democrats attacked those principles against our will late Sunday night in a dastardly move straight out of a bad political drama.

They cut deals and plotted a nefarious scheme to place a proposition on the November ballot that will undermine and undo the work of the over a million Californians who signed a petition earlier this year to put their measure, the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act, to a vote of the people.

Opinion

The citizen’s initiative aims to resolve the rampant crime ravaging our communities since Newsom’s own Proposition 47 passed back in 2014. But Newsom couldn’t have that, no. So, he did what any self-serving politician would do – he introduced a proposition that, if passed, will void and nullify the one Californians have spent years working on.

Prop. 47 made petty theft (stolen items of $950 or less) a misdemeanor no matter how many times the theft repeats in crime. It has led to this explosion of retail theft because for the criminal, there is no real consequence.

Unlike the citizen’s initiative, Newsom’s disingenuous ploy omits consequences for many repeat retail theft cases. It fails to hold deadly fentanyl dealers accountable with meaningful prison time. It does not get repeat drug offenders the treatment that they need by requiring incarceration as the alternative. And it pays lip service, at best, to the needed reforms in our public safety systems. It will have little impact beyond increasing soft-on-crime judges’ discretion. It is an insidious maneuver to split the voters and protect the failed policy that led us to lawlessness in the first place. Newsom’s legislation—Senate Bill 1381—would do nothing more than confuse voters who want their communities to be safer.

This is wrong on so many levels. Instead of leveling with voters and listening to their concerns, Newsom is playing cynical games. Until very recently, Newsom and other top Democrats had said for months that Prop. 47 didn’t need to be amended. But now that more than a million Californians helped qualify an initiative that would do just that, Newsom suddenly wants to float a weaker initiative to undermine the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act.

The great Republican President Abraham Lincoln famously said at Gettysburg, “Democracy is a rule of the people, for the people and by the people.” This, then, is not democracy. Newsom and legislative Democrats have fully abandoned the democratic process with this move – and others recently. They’ve spent the better part of the spring and early summer fighting the people they are supposed to represent who are begging for relief from the crime wave that’s taken hold of their communities.

They first tried bullying supporters of the citizen’s public safety initiative to remove it from the ballot. No luck. Then they fired up the strong-arm tactics – putting poison pills in good public safety bills, holding bipartisan measures hostage, and using the wellbeing of all Californians as a bargaining chip.

They hoped it would coerce a withdrawal of the citizens’ public safety reform initiative that Californians are clamoring for – it didn’t.

Back to the war room they went, this time launching their latest full frontal assault against the will of everyday Californians as most of us slept Sunday evening. This new proposition of the governor will serve only to eliminate any hope for real, much-needed public safety reform and, in the process, erode the trust voters have in their elected leaders and the democratic process itself.

Californians have long cherished the citizen’s initiative process. It has served as a backstop against government overreach and a beacon of hope for oppressed, disenfranchised and downtrodden Californians for over a century.

It knows no party line. It does not discriminate. It knows only the will of the people, and it is the purest form of democracy we have.

Let us not cheapen it now. Let us not snuff out the last embers of direct democracy that still burn in this state. We have an opportunity to stop this attack on democracy. It’s not too late to pull this thing back and do the right thing.

We need real, meaningful public safety reform – which this new proposition is not. If Newsom and legislative Democrats can’t or won’t trust the voters to act in their best interests come November, they should get out of the way.

I call on Governor Newsom and legislative Democrats to pull this proposed initiative and allow the people of this great state to speak for themselves on public safety reform.

Senator Brian W. Jones is the Senate Minority leader for the California Senate Republican caucus and he represents the 40th Senate District.