NEWSOM, HARRIS SUDDENLY BECOME POTENTIAL POST-BIDEN RIVALS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2024 OR THEREAFTER
 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        “NEWSOM, HARRIS SUDDENLY BECOME POTENTIAL POST-BIDEN RIVALS”

 

        For more than 25 years, as they climbed the political ladder of politics in California and the nation, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris have acted like friendly colleagues, assiduously avoiding conflict.

 

        They shared a mentor in former San Francisco Mayor and state Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. They shared campaign consultants. They’ve never butted heads, each always running for offices the other was either willing to bypass or ineligible to hold (Harris was San Francisco district attorney; as a non-lawyer, Newsom could never do that).

 

        Now the cognitive problems of President Biden are pushing them toward a possible rivalry.

 

        As pressure mounts for Biden to step away from the Democratic Party nomination for President, Harris and Newsom are on most short lists to replace him.

 

        Harris has survived several close calls, including a razor-thin victory in her first run for California attorney general, and she's never been an overwhelming vote-getter. Witness her early withdrawal from the 2020 Democratic primaries.

 

        Newsom has had no trouble getting elected, winning all his runs by wide margins: twice for San Francisco mayor, lieutenant governor twice, governor twice and easily beating back the 2021 Republican-sponsored recall attempt.

 

        Both are among the most vocal advocates for Biden even after his June 27 debate debacle, in which he appeared sometimes to lose focus and failed to call out any of ex-President Donald Trump’s outright lies with specific information. One example came when Trump repeatedly claimed Democrat-dominated states allow not just late-term abortions, but also killing of babies after they’re born.

 

        No state allows this. It is murder everywhere. But Biden did not say that. It was his best chance to show 50 million viewers just how blatant Trump's lies can be. It was a blown opportunity.

 

        This is one cause of the pressure now mounting on the incumbent to bow out and let delegates to the August Democratic National Convention choose someone else. Such pressure cannot get much stronger than the firm call from the New York Times to step down.

 

        It will be much harder for Biden to survive that call than for Trump to survive a similar demand from the Philadelphia Inquirer that he step down because of his incessant stream of falsehoods.

 

        If they were not from the same state, even the same city, Newsom and Harris might team up as a possible replacement ticket for today’s Biden-Harris.

 

        But they can’t be on the ticket together. In American history, there has never been a same-state ticket; many scholars believe it would be unconstitutional. This is one thing making Trump hesitate to pick Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his running mate, with Trump’s official residence also in Florida.

 

        Who else could Democrats tap aside from Newsom or Harris, both now performing credibly in speaking for Biden after his debate problems? Harris sticks up for him, while also conceding that was “not his finest moment.”

 

        Newsom, already Biden’s leading surrogate, was strategically present in the “spin room” after that debate, repeatedly denying interest in replacing Biden.

 

        But there was no General Sherman-like statement of “if nominated, I will not run” or “if elected, I will not serve.”

 

        Yes, Democrats could tap someone like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, both popular in their states. But no Democrat besides Newsom and Harris actually has national debate experience, Newsom having taken on Florida’s conservative Gov. Ron DeSantis last fall while neither was actively seeking office.

 

        Newsom is also the only Democrat to use his own campaign money for TV commercials backing Democrats and excoriating Republicans in red states like Alabama and Florida. Plus, Newsom has campaigned not only for Biden, but many other Democrats.

 

        Harshly criticized by the California GOP for recording and distributing his state of the state speech, rather than doing it live, Newsom may have had an instinct, since that speech could serve as a Democratic manifesto by maintaining progressive values are the best antidote for excesses of the far right represented by Trump.

 

        All of which means that more than perhaps anyone else, both Harris and Newsom are prepped and ready to step in if Biden drops out.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

WILL VOTERS’ DECISION ON CASH BAIL BE DEFIED?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 16, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “WILL VOTERS’ DECISION ON CASH BAIL BE DEFIED?”

        California voters resoundingly backed the idea of cash bail last fall, when they rejected Proposition 25 by a 56-44 percent margin, more than a 2 million-vote majority relegating a state law passed early in 2019 to the trash bin.

 

        And yet…it now seems likely that money bail will play a far smaller role in the criminal justice systems of the state’s two biggest urban centers than it ever has, despite the decisive vote,

 

        That’s because the district attorneys of both Los Angeles and San Francisco counties supported Prop. 25 and the law it sought to uphold, the 2019 SB 10 (not related to a currently active housing bill with the same number). The rejected 2019 law aimed to substitute judges’ risk assessments for bail as the method by which accused criminals would or would not be released while awaiting trial.

 

        Both Chesa Boudin of San Francisco and George Gascon in Los Angeles are determined to thwart the voters’ will – Gascon indicating he will go against majority of the electorate that voted him in. He ran on a platform including the elimination of cash bail, and it appears he has the power to make that come true in many cases no matter what voters may want. Yet, Los Angeles County voted by a 55-45 percent margin to keep cash bail going.

 

        If the wishes of the voters are denied, it will be far from the first time. Nor do their fast moves toward prosecutorial or judicial discretion in bail, rather than putting up cash or other valuables, seem likely to threaten the political fortunes of either district attorney.

 

        The precedents for disregarding the documented will of the voters are many, and very recent. Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, soon after assuming office granted reprieves to more than 700 inmates on the state’s Death Row and ordered the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison dismantled. That way, no court order reversing his directive could be easily enforced.

 

        Newsom acted without regard for how cruel or heinous were the crimes committed by those sentenced to death, no matter how strongly the sentencing juries may have felt. This was despite the outcomes of two statewide votes to preserve the death penalty, one as recent as in 2016.

 

        Newsom, of course, promised during his 2018 election campaign, to be “accountable to the will of the voters.” So much for campaign promises.

 

        Newsom was joined later in 2019 by state legislators in defying another expression of the voters’ will when he signed a bill spreading rent controls to virtually all of California. This one applies to single-family homes and apartments more than 10 years old even in cities whose own rent-control laws specifically exempt them. He also signed a bill to end what sponsoring Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco calls rent gouging and another making evictions far more difficult.

 

        This came just after voters turned down Proposition 10 in 2018 by a 60-40 percent margin, rejecting a plan to let cities and counties adopt rent controls of any kind without local voters having a say. They voted by an identical margin last fall to reject a rerun of the same proposition, obviously realizing that rent controls have never solved housing shortages anywhere in California.

 

        Perhaps it’s the one-party rule that prevails both in Sacramento and the state’s two big urban centers that’s rendering leftist politicians fearless of facing voters’ wrath even when their clearly expressed will is reversed.

 

        Democrats hold every statewide office, plus huge majorities in both houses of the Legislature, besides having strangleholds on city councils and county boards in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Who’s going to stop legislators or local officials from crossing the voters if the voters don’t act to stop them?

 

        Those officials all know the Republican label is so toxic in the most populous parts of California that merely defying or ignoring what the public wants will cost them nothing, so they do it without even hesitating.

 

        They’re doing it again this spring, the latest focus now on their eagerness to say hang the election returns and end cash bail.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WILDFIRE FUND PLAN: CONSUMERS WILL BAIL OUT UTILITIES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “WILDFIRE FUND PLAN: CONSUMERS WILL BAIL OUT UTILITIES”

          There’s one word Gov. Gavin Newsom has assiduously avoided in the days since he proposed a new $30.5 billion Wildfire Fund that would help the state’s big privately-owned utilities pay off damage claims from forest and brush fires their lines have sparked or helped to cause: Bailout.

          This fund would shore up utility finances as they face tens of billions of dollars in potential judgments from lawsuits that followed fires they admittedly helped cause via negligence during 2017 and 2018.

          Under pressure from Wall Street investment firms, Newsom proposed that utility customers (often euphemistically called “ratepayers”) and utility shareholders share the costs. The legislative form of Newsom’s plan makes it clear customers would be stuck with at least half the costs of utility negligence.

          This bill, AB 1054, co-sponsored by Democratic Assembly members Chris Holden of Pasadena, Autumn Burke of Inglewood and Republican Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley, places the burden of proving utilities acted prudently on the consumers, reversing many decades of precedent.

          There’s an unasked, unanswered question here, ignored largely because of the sheer power of the utility lobby and its financial allies, all of whom could lose big bucks if other utilities follow Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into bankruptcy: Why should customers/ratepayers foot any bills when they did nothing to cause these fires?

          It’s a fact that customers’ monthly bills for decades included money earmarked for utility maintenance. That tab came to more than $6 billion over almost 50 years before the latest spate of big blazes.

State and federal regulators never tracked what the companies did with most of that money. As a result, California saw the fatal San Bruno natural gas line explosion in 2010 and huge amounts of vegetation sitting on or near power lines before the start of the state’s largest and most costly fires ever during 2017-18.

          If much of the maintenance money went to executive bonuses and other optional items, another question arises: Do these irresponsible monopoly companies deserve to survive?

          For sure, there are other ways PG&E, for one example, could raise whatever money it needs to pay off upcoming negligence judgments. Here’s one: sell off its natural gas division and some of its electric assets.

          This could produce many billions of dollars, exact amounts depending on how many assets are sold.

          AB 1054 contemplates none of that. It would keep the same companies that damaged thousands of lives in business. And Newsom asked that his Wildfire Fund plan be rushed through in a matter of a few weeks, urging passage by July 12.

         

          “It’s a massive hijacking of the state of California,” says Michael Aguirre, former city attorney of San Diego.

          Newsom’s rationale: “Financially unstable electrical utilities will put wildfire victims in jeopardy and cause California families to see their electrical bills skyrocket,” he said, parroting the utility line. No wonder PG&E stock rose sharply after release of his plan.

          But would there be so much as a glitch if Warren Buffett’s Oregon-based Portland General Electric took over gas operations in Northern California? Even the company initials would be the same. And what if the state’s publicly-owned Community Choice Aggregation electric outfits bought up PG&E dams and power lines? Why would that cause service problems?

          Meanwhile, Newsom cleverly devised his plan so customers rescuing the undeserving utilities would barely notice their new payments. He would continue a current $30 per year fee that was about to expire. Bills wouldn’t change until after the next huge fire piles on even more claims. Business as usual would continue at companies that spent many years mismanaging safety operations.

The governor also wants utilities to develop safety plans to be OK’ed by the state Public Utilities Commission. Never mind the PUC’s long history of kowtowing to utilities, favoring them over their customers/ratepayers.

          How could consumers be sure the new safety plans would be worth the paper they’re printed on? This is the same PUC that has long ducked its own safety responsibilities by hiring far too few inspectors to check all power and gas lines.

          So Newsom’s fund can only be described with the one word he badly wants to avoid: bailout.

                  

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WILL HOUSE GOP MAKE PRESIDENTIAL SUICIDE PACT?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “WILL HOUSE GOP MAKE PRESIDENTIAL SUICIDE PACT?”

    Maybe Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican congressman from Orange County best known for his surfing photo-ops, has wiped out once too often. Or maybe his ultra-safe political turf keeps him from seeing the reality that stares his party in the face when it comes to the issue of immigration.

    Whatever the reason, Rohrabacher demanded early in the House of Representatives’ discussion of immigration changes that his fellow Republican, Speaker John Boehner, poll the GOP’s 234 congress members before he allows a House vote on any immigration bill.

          That would follow the so-called “Hastert rule,” – named after former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert – which says no bill of any kind should ever get a vote without the backing of a majority of the majority party.

          Doing this would likely mean no immigration bill containing any kind of pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants will pass so long as Republicans hold a House majority.

          Boehner quickly succumbed to the pressure. “I don’t see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn’t have majority support of Republicans,” he told reporters.

          Call this a presidential election suicide pact, for doing it might mean no Republican will be elected President for quite a while to come. That, at least, is the contention of Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, one of four Republicans in the so-called “Gang of Eight” that crafted most of the immigration bill which passed the Senate in late June.

          “If we don’t get (immigration reform) in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016,” Graham said. “We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community is to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

          How can that be correct, when Republicans easily hung onto their House majority last year, even as President Obama was handily reelected? Mainly, it’s because gerrymandered districts in states where Republicans control legislatures guarantee huge GOP edges in their congressional delegations. That gives the GOP clout in the House far exceeding its share of popular votes cast for Congress.

          Rohrabacher is effectively sealed off from the sort of pressures Graham cites because his coastal district is so heavily Republican.

          That left him free to launch a gnarly wave toward Boehner, who was about to stage his first-ever meeting with the all-Democratic Congressional Hispanic Caucus. For conservatives like Rohrabacher, it’s almost treasonous to let the Democrats’ 201 House votes count for anything – and the only immigration bills that stand a chance of passing the House without Democratic support would do things like making felons of anyone in this country without proper documents.

          Rohrabacher told a conservative radio host that Boehner would face a party revolt if he allows a vote on any bill like the Senate one. “I would consider it a betrayal of the Republican members of the House and a betrayal of Republicans throughout the country,” Rohrabacher said. “If Boehner moves forward…he should be removed as speaker.”

          That sentiment flies in the face of national polls, unanimous in finding a large majority of Americans favors a path to citizenship for the undocumented, especially if it is as arduous a path as the Senate bill would make it: Heavy fines, waiting periods of about 13 years for many, thorough background checks and more.

          With Boehner caving to the pressure from Rohrabacher and other ultra-conservatives, Graham’s prediction of GOP disaster may come to pass. One survey by the Latino Decisions polling firm, for example, found that as many as 40 percent of Hispanic voters would be willing to give GOP presidential candidates a new look – but only if the party takes a leadership role on immigration changes.

          Latinos, the fastest growing ethnic voter bloc in America, still vote in numbers far below their percentage of the population. As more register and vote, they will gain even more importance than they had last year, when Obama’s 77-23 percent majority among them was instrumental in his reelection.

          The bottom line for Republican purists is simple: If they insist on treating all the undocumented as criminals or something similar, they very likely will doom their party to at least one more presidential wipeout.

          But if they surprise and prove willing to compromise, it could be Democrats who fall off the wave.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NECESSITY BREEDING GOOD PUBLIC PENSION IDEAS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 16, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NECESSITY BREEDING GOOD PUBLIC PENSION IDEAS”

For many years, one justification for giving generous pensions and other benefits to public employees was that their pay was below what most of them could get in the private sector. Rich pensions were seen as a recruiting tool, one way to get top people into government and keep them there.

But times have changed. Despite the furloughs imposed on many state and local government workers, not only are most government jobs more secure than those at private businesses, but salaries for most are at least comparable to those in the private sector and pensions are far more generous.

That’s been accentuated over the last three years as company after company abandoned the style of pension plan that offers regular monthly payments for life, shifting to 401(k) accounts allowing employees to build savings for retirement but not protecting them from failed investments.

While some private pension plans that have been “grandfathered in” for longtime employees allow retirees to start collecting somewhat reduced benefits at age 55, many retirees from California government jobs – especially police and firemen – can start collecting full pensions five years earlier than that.

So taxes from people with inferior pensions are funding the fatter monthly checks going to folks who allegedly work for them. Something seems wrong here, and many have come to resent it.

These are some of the reasons behind a sudden flood of ideas that emanated from the campaign trail during the spring primary election. Another impetus: the miserable recent investment records of California’s two biggest public retirement systems – the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers Retirement System – have forced state and local governments to fork over far more to fund pensions than they did, say, 10 years ago.

At the height of the dot-com investment bubble in the late 1990s, state government paid almost nothing to fund pensions because the funds’ results from investing employee retirement contributions were copious. Now the state pays more than $3 billion a year to fund those pensions. It’s the same for local government, where for one example, Los Angeles will use about 19 percent of its new budget to fund pensions.

One study by economists at Stanford University estimated it would take five consecutive years of 20 percent investment profits for the big state pension plans to return their assets to levels equal to their obligations.

Which has led almost everyone in politics today to conclude something has to change. Why should public pensions be based in large part on what an employee gets in his or her last year, when employees can arrange to pad their overtime hours during that year, a practice called “pension spiking?” Why should non-police and fire government employees be able to draw full pensions at 55 when almost no one in the private sector can get full payments before age 65? Why should police and fire personnel get full pensions starting at age 50?

Good questions all, and they have been asked in recent months by candidates on all political sides as well as figures like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a onetime union organizer. No one suggests existing employees who were promised benefits at today’s levels when they were hired should have the rug pulled from under them. That would be illegal. But changes affecting new hires are certainly legal and possible.

Schwarzenegger, for one, calls state worker pensions “the single biggest threat to the fiscal health of California’s future.” He endorsed a bill by state Senate Republican leader Dennis Hollingsworth of Temecula that would increase retirement ages for most new hires from 55 to 65 and for public safety workers from 50 to 57. Hollingsworth also would change the way benefits are awarded by using an average of workers’ three highest-paid years, rather than just their last year.

Public employee unions say these changes are not needed, that an economic recovery will restore the pension system to good health. They say only a relative few government retirees get six-figure pensions, with most receiving benefits of less than $30,000 per year.

Some of those assertions are true. But that doesn’t change the contrasts between defined-benefit public employee pensions and what’s happened to private ones.

The bottom line is that change will come soon to government pensions. They won’t disappear, but they will come to look more like what’s available to other workers. That will happen no matter who becomes governor next winter. It might, in fact, happen sooner if Democrat Jerry Brown, endorsed by labor and accustomed to working with public employee unions, wins the fall election than if it’s Republican MegWhitman, who would face a Democratic-controlled Legislature filled with lawmakers beholden to the unions that helped them get elected.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net