Newsom and top Democrats are insulting California voters with secret political games | Opinion

Democrats face a midnight deadline to decide on $20 billion worth of bonds and a last-minute crime reform initiative. The final package is merely hours old.

The party running Sacramento increasingly does its work in secret and with utter contempt for the voting public and legislators who are not among the chosen few. The imperious behavior of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislative leadership may come back to haunt them. The public has a way of humbling those who believe they are smarter than voters.

Skillful leadership inherently requires a lot of conversations and back and forth. Compromises are frequently found in private meetings. But what’s increasingly happening in Sacramento with this generation of untested leaders is completely different. Gone is any pretense of a transparent process.

Opinion

The irony is that these same Democrats love to worry about the dictatorial tendencies of a certain Republican seeking the presidency and the threat he poses to America. Yet these same lefties have turned California lawmaking into a political puppet show. Sacramento is drowning in a sea of sanctimony and bad process. Let’s review.

Sentencing reform

Gavin Newsom has said for months that he did not want voters to change California’s sentencing reform through some initiative. . “Why do something that can’t be done legislatively with more flexibility…?” he told reporters just a few weeks ago.

The same governor is no longer seeking legislation. Instead, he is eating his previous words and now supporting a voter initiative this November.

Why? A citizen’s initiative backed by district attorneys and law enforcement is heading to the November ballot that alters one of the sacred cows of the Democrat Party, Proposition 47 passed by voters in 2014. A landmark rollback of sentences for crimes that are not violent or serious, Prop. 47 is now in hot debate in how it made petty theft (pilfering less than $950) a misdemeanor no matter how many times someone commits the crime.

Only another initiative can adjust any sentencing formula. The citizen’s initiative would make a third petty theft in a Californian’s lifetime a felony. For months, Newsom and Democrats tried to talk initiative backers out of their measure in exchange for legislation that did not amend Prop. 47, a strategy that was futile from the get-go.

So now Newsom is urging the Legislature to pass a weaker version of the citizen’s measure that only addresses a subset of the repeat shoplifting and doesn’t address how to get repeat drug offenders into treatment whatsoever.

This idea is so last-minute and poorly vetted, that it’s unclear whether moderate Democrats will support it, compared to the citizens initiative. And if progressive Democrats in both the Assembly and Senate, loath to any stiffer sentencing reform, do not come on board in sufficient numbers, Newsom’s last-minute initiative play may backfire.

There’s at least one report that Newsom, in yet another reversal, is about to avoid a legislative meltdown by pulling his competing initiative from consideration altogether today. It was also announced that Newsom was headed to Washington D.C. on Wednesday to “stand with” President Biden at a meeting with Democratic governors. Biden is trying to calm fears that he’s politically weak, something Newsom will have in common with him considering the Prop. 47 debacle that Newsom leaves in his wake.

Bonds

In the classic holiday cartoon “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the inexperienced Charlie puts a giant ornament on a spindly Christmas tree, toppling it and sending the young Brown into despair. The moment ultimately had a happy ending. The problem in Sacramento, when it comes to a climate change bond, is controlling the number and size of the fiscal ornaments.

Legislative Democrats on Sunday unveiled a $10 billion package of spending with a poll-tested title: The Safe Drinking Water, Wildfire Prevention, Drought Preparedness, and Clean Air Bond Act of 2024.

There is no time to fix this complex spending proposal. Why do the Democrats want to borrow, for example, to pay for annual levee maintenance needs in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta? Or provide hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies to wind farms in the Pacific Ocean? Or allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to the state’s legions of conservancies statewide with little to no accountability?

What the state should support with taxpayer money is completely different than what the many stakeholders want. Nothing brings out the worst in Sacramento like a chase for free money. Months of secrecy on the final product did not resolve the underlying problem. To unveil the final sausage the Sunday before the vote was an insult.

A companion $10 billion bond to help build new schools, a more straightforward matter, is caught up in the same drama. Sacrificed in the process was financial help to build more affordable housing. The Democrats forgot we had a housing and homeless crisis, leaving no bond money for those investments without a second of debate as to why. Perhaps the poor can live out in the ocean on a wind farm.

Regardless of what happens, the public has already lost.