Tag: state

The Proud Boys Love a Winner

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A second Trump term would validate the violent ideologies of far-right extremists—and allow them to escape legal jeopardy.

Matt Huynh

December 6, 2023, 6 AM ET

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Until the very end of his presidency, Donald Trump’s cultivation of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other violent far-right groups was usually implicit. He counted on their political support but stopped short of asking them to do anything.

Trump had mastered a form of radicalization sometimes known as stochastic terrorism—riling up followers in ways that made bloodshed likely while preserving plausible deniability on his part.

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But in the weeks after November 3, 2020, his language became more direct. He named the place and occasion for a “big protest”—on January 6, 2021, when Congress would be certifying his election loss—and told supporters, “Be there, will be wild!” When that day arrived, Trump told the assembled crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” With that, the president of the United States embraced violence as the natural extension of Americans’ democratic differences, and he has not stopped since.

Trump continues to lash out at his perceived enemies. Yet Americans have mostly been able to treat Trump’s extremism as background noise. That’s partly because he’s no longer in office, and partly because he’s no longer using Twitter. But it’s also because the legal counteroffensive against pro-Trump extremism, along with a proliferation of court proceedings holding Trump himself to task for his misdeeds, appears to have given his fans reason to think twice before committing crimes on his behalf.

From the November 2020 issue: A pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans

Extremism ebbs and flows. Violent groups can grow only when they can raise money and recruit members faster than law enforcement can shut down their operations. They thrive when they are perceived to be winning; even the kind of person who might be drawn to violence makes a calculation about whether taking part in a plot to, say, overthrow an election or kidnap the governor of Michigan will be worth the risk. In the past few years, Trump’s election loss and his legal woes have made him less persuasive in this regard.

Trump now faces both state and federal conspiracy charges for his efforts to stay in power despite losing the election. Leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have received long prison sentences for their role in the violence of January 6. Fox News, which knowingly broadcast false statements about faulty voting machines rather than offend its pro-Trump core audience, agreed to a defamation settlement of nearly $800 million with Dominion Voting Systems. All of these proceedings have demonstrated that Trump and his supporters will be held accountable for what they do and say.

But if Trump wins another term, both he and his most disreputable supporters will feel vindicated. The Republican Party has already given Trump a pass for exhorting a mob to break into the Capitol. In turn, Trump has promised to pardon many of the January 6 insurrectionists. His forgiveness could extend to extremist leaders convicted on federal charges.

Federalism, to be sure, would be a check on his power. Trump’s followers, like Trump himself, may still be subject to state prosecution. But a president with firm control of the Justice Department, who wields a corps of supporters willing to use intimidation for political ends and who has maintained a considerable following among police, could overwhelm the ability of state institutions to uphold the law.

From the January/February 2024 issue: Barton Gellman on how Trump gets away with it

Trump’s bullying of military leaders, journalists, and judges was never merely the ranting of an attention seeker, and that behavior—backed by the credible threat of violence from radicalized supporters—will likely become even more central to his governing style. “The extremism won’t be some side group,” Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor who studies political violence, told me. “It won’t be like a terror group against the state. The conditions will be different. It will be embedded into state institutions, and into the orientation of the state against perceived opponents.”

What’s clear is that a restored Trump would have a winning narrative in which right-wing extremism, after suffering some legal setbacks during the Biden interregnum, thrives again.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Extremists Emboldened.”

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Juliette Kayyem

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December 6, 2023
After a mild fire year, Southern California crews look ahead to 2024

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On a cool, cloudy morning one day last week, Albert Rivas approached a pile of dry wood in the Angeles National Forest and set it on fire.

The pile roared to life, and within minutes, it was spewing flames at least 10 feet tall. Rivas, a firefighter with the United States Forest Service, paused briefly to admire his handiwork before aiming his gasoline- and diesel-filled drip torch at another pile nearby.

By morning’s end, he and more than a dozen other Forest Service firefighters had burned about 17 acres’ worth of woody material around the Lower San Antonio Fire Station at the base of Mt. Baldy — a forest management feat they attributed to favorable weather and fuel conditions.

“It’s all about going at it the right way, correctly, with all the techniques,” Rivas said as smoke swirled around him.

A U.S. Forest Service fire crew stands behind the smoking remnants of a controlled burn.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

This year has indeed been favorable for Southern California firefighters. Heavy rains in winter — as well as a rare tropical storm in August — put an end to three years of punishing drought and made the landscape far less likely to burn.

“It was a fairly mild year,” said Robert Garcia, fire chief of the Angeles National Forest. “The fire season started later and, throughout most of the state, ended early. That provided us some reprieve from that intensity to our workforce, but also some tremendous opportunity this year to get out there and do more treatment on the landscape.”

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In 2023, there were 92 confirmed fires in the Angeles National Forest, the largest of which was about 420 acres. Statewide, firefighters responded to nearly 6,900 blazes that collectively burned about 320,000 acres, according to data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

That’s a far cry from 2020 and 2021, the state’s two worst fire years on record, which together saw nearly 7 million acres burn, including California’s first million-acre fire.

Last year’s acreage was also relatively small — about 363,000 acres — but the blazes claimed more than 700 structures and nine lives.

U.S. Forest Service firefighters burn piles of forest debris below Mt. Baldy.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

Garcia attributed much of this year’s tameness to the rains, which ended the “off the charts” dryness that had plagued the landscape in recent years, priming it to burn. What’s more, the weather freed up resources across the state, meaning more crews were able to prepare for fires and respond when they ignited, keeping the numbers small. Some Southern California crews even deployed to assist with larger fires in Oregon, Washington and Canada.

But a mild year is not a year off, he said, and the outlook for 2024 could be affected by the damp conditions this year, which spurred tons of “green-up” in the form of new grasses and vegetation across the region and the state.

“There’s always trade-offs,” Garcia said. “One of the primary benefits [of the rain] is restoring some of the vegetation cycles, but generally speaking, depending on when Mother Nature turns that spigot off, it’s really a matter of how fast those fuels are going to dry out.”

The current seasonal outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls for wetter-than-normal conditions in California through at least February, which forecasters say may be supercharged by El Niño. But once the rains stop, all that new vegetation could be fuel for next year’s conflagrations.

Piles of debris burn on a forested hillside.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

Still, there is no denying this year was beneficial. In the 2023 fiscal year — Oct. 1, 2022, through Sept. 30 — the Forest Service performed mechanical treatments on 261,000 acres of federal forestland in the state. Mechanical treatment includes wood chipping, mastication and removal of trees, branches, leaves, biomass and other material from the forest, which has built up in recent decades and can feed flames.

Forest Service crews in the state also conducted prescribed fires covering 51,614 acres, or fires that are intentionally set to clear out that same material. Firefighters in the Angeles National Forest were able to conduct prescribed burns all the way into June, which they have not been able to do for several years due to drought conditions, and resumed operations in October.

“Fire season historically has ended around November and started up again in May,” said David Gabaldon, a forestry fuels technician with the Forest Service and the “burn boss” at last week’s prescribed burn. “The last probably 10 years now, we’ve almost become a year-round fire department, or fire management group, due to other events like global warming and weather.”

He noted that he recently returned from a prescribed burn in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which had been “almost unheard of” in recent years because of the dry conditions.

Like Garcia, Gabaldon was concerned about the new growth this year. The grass was “coming back so quick that we would clear it, and then within two or three months during sprouting season, it would come right back up,” he said. “It’s like doing your yard.”

He hoped that the pile burns last week would act as a reminder to neighboring communities that defensible space efforts and home hardening projects can help protect them during a blaze.

Forest Service crews conducted prescribed fires covering 51,614 acres in California all the way into June, which they have not been able to do for several years due to drought conditions.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

“We’ve got to be the role model, so this is exactly what we’re trying to do here,” he said. “This is good defensible space around our own buildings.”

But challenges remain. Though the agency treated about 313,000 acres in the state this fiscal year, California is home to approximately 33 million acres of forestland — about 19 million acres of which are federally managed. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection treated about 91,000 acres this year.

What’s more, recent research published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment indicates that climate change is narrowing the window for prescribed burns in the Western United States.

As the planet warms, severe short-term drought will continue to combine with a long-term drying effect known as aridification to reduce adequate burn conditions in the region, the study found, “raising concerns that climate change will add to the many existing challenges to prescribed fire implementation.” By 2060, California could see an additional month or more each year when prescribed burns will be too dangerous.

The Forest Service is also grappling with a retention issue as crews fight for a permanent pay increase from the federal government. Base pay for some firefighters starts at as little as $15 an hour, and thousands have threatened to walk off the force if the pay increase is not finalized.

Garcia said so far, he has been able to maintain staffing levels on the Angeles National Forest, but he hoped to see a resolution soon.

Approximately 17 acres’ worth of material around the Lower San Antonio Fire Station was cleared during the recent controlled burn at the base of Mt. Baldy in Southern California.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

At the same time, teams have benefited from a national wildfire crisis strategy introduced by the Biden administration, he said. The 10-year strategy includes congressional funding geared toward increasing the pace and scale of forest treatments, among other efforts. The strategy has identified Southern California as a priority landscape, Garcia said.

At the pile burn last week, crews were optimistic about such efforts. Mark Muñoz, a suppression battalion chief, said a fire recently sparked in an area of the forest that had been treated earlier in the season, and was quickly extinguished.

“Fighting fire in a treated area versus a non-treated area? Extremely important and crucial,” he said.

Muñoz added that while it may have seemed like a mild season from the outside, the work is nonstop.

“When we’re not fighting fire, we’re not hanging out on the sofa and watching TV — we’re out here cutting with chainsaws and hand tools, and we’re over here doing prescribed fire,” he said, motioning to the smoldering piles around him. “So 12 months out of the year, we’re still technically fighting fire. Because this is still fighting fire.”

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Hayley Smith

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December 4, 2023
Proposal for new water district sparks fear of Northern California 'water grab'

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As California grapples with worsening cycles of drought, a proposal to create a new water district in Butte County has sparked fears of a profit-driven water grab by large-scale farmers and outside interests.

In the walnut and almond orchards along State Route 99 near Chico, agricultural landowners have led a years-long campaign to form the Tuscan Water District — an entity they say is vital for the future of farming in this part of Northern California. They say having the district will enable them to bring in water and build infrastructure to recharge the groundwater aquifer.

Yet some residents argue the district would open the door to water profiteering, claiming the plan would connect local supplies to California water markets, and allow the state to demand transfers during drought emergencies.

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The proposal, which will be decided Tuesday via mail-in balloting, has generated debate about the use of partially depleted aquifers to store imported water. Although major water suppliers in other parts of the state, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, have invested in efforts to bank water underground for times of drought, the concept has met with deep suspicion in Butte County.

“You put in the infrastructure, you start taking over the groundwater basin for private profit, and it changes everything,” said Barbara Vlamis, executive director of AquAlliance, an organization focused on protecting water resources in the Sacramento Valley. “It becomes this economic engine for these people that want to take over ownership.”

Supporters deny the charges of seeking to sell or export water. They say the district is necessary to address the local groundwater deficit and achieve sustainability in the coming years, as required under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA.

“This is the most important development in local agriculture in a hundred years,” said Richard McGowan, a farmer who is one of the campaign’s leaders.

Local nut and fruit orchards depend entirely on groundwater, which because of overuse is projected to require reductions in pumping to meet state-mandated sustainability goals.

McGowan said the district, once formed, could plan projects to transport water to the area and use that water instead of pumping from wells, or use it to recharge the groundwater basin. Another benefit of forming the agency, he said, would be the ability to apply for government grants to fund infrastructure projects.

“We’re going to have to become sustainable,” McGowan said. “This gives us a great opportunity to work together to preserve this water resource we have. And now water has become such a hot topic, and the state has now become involved with it, that it almost dictates that we do something like this.”

Those who are fighting the district say it’s unnecessary. Vlamis argued the area’s current overuse of groundwater, which is not as severe as other parts of the Central Valley, could easily be addressed through conservation, estimating that if growers would save about 5%, that would be enough.

She and others argue that if infrastructure is built to bring in water for groundwater recharge, the imported water that’s stored in the aquifer would become a privately owned asset, effectively creating a water bank. They say the groundwater basin could then be drawn down and filled with banked water, which could be sold and shipped elsewhere for profit.

Such water banks have been established by various entities elsewhere in the state, such as the southern San Joaquin Valley.

Vlamis said banking water would require a drawdown of the aquifer to create storage space, which would diminish the flow of streams, threaten groundwater-dependent trees and put shallow domestic wells at risk of running dry.

“I think it is a damaging effort that could potentially destroy this region as we know it,” Vlamis said.

A pump draws groundwater to irrigate a nut orchard near Nord in Butte County.

(Jeffrey Obser)

Opponents formed a political action committee called Groundwater for Butte, which has warned that establishing the district is a “water grab by Big Ag and the state.”

“When they begin to pump water into the ground, from surface water that is already owned by private parties, those companies or those interests will own the water in the ground under my house,” said Jeffrey Obser, executive director of Groundwater for Butte. “That public status of the water will slowly be erased.”

Supporters of the Tuscan Water District called such claims unfounded, saying they do not intend to transfer any water out of the area — and that measures are in place to prevent that from happening.

They pointed out that the resolution outlining the district’s authority specifically states that it will not “have the powers to export, transfer, or move water” outside the local Vina and Butte subbasins, and that the district will not transfer any imported water outside its boundaries.

“That’s an important restriction,” said Tovey Giezentanner, a consultant and spokesperson for the Tuscan Water District. “It was formed without the power to export water out of the county.”

Another of the conditions adopted by the Local Agency Formation Commission says the district must submit proposed projects, such as those focusing on aquifer recharge, to the local groundwater agency to ensure consistency with the area’s state-required groundwater sustainability plan.

Those conditions “will ensure that the water stays local,” Giezentanner said.

Supporters note that Butte County also has since the 1990s had an ordinance that requires a county review process for any transfers of local groundwater outside the county, or for so-called groundwater substitution transfers, in which a property owner would sell surface water that would otherwise be used locally and, as a substitute, would pump groundwater.

McGowan touted those measures, saying the effort to create the agency “is not about shipping water out of the county.”

But Vlamis said the district’s bylaws could easily be changed to allow for water to be moved out of the area, and the county ordinance simply outlines a procedure that would have to be followed.

“Even if that’s not their intention, to transfer water out of here, all it takes is an emergency proclamation by the governor, and all local ordinances and everything are thrown out,” Vlamis said. “You may have honorable intentions, but once the state wants more water, and you’ve put in the infrastructure to facilitate this, all bets are off.”

The water district’s proposed 102,000-acre territory covers a portion of the Tuscan Aquifer around Chico. It would overlap with part of the local Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency’s territory.

State regulators have endorsed the area’s groundwater management plans, but Vlamis’ group AquAlliance is suing to challenge the Vina plan, as well as two other local plans. The group cites various failures in the plans, saying they would allow for substantial declines in groundwater levels, threatening wells and streams.

Vlamis said she’s convinced there is a longstanding interest among state and federal water officials to “integrate” the county’s groundwater into the state’s supplies, allowing for water to be transferred out of the area.

The state Department of Water Resources denied that.

Landowners have been casting ballots in the mail-election election. The balloting is weighted based on assessed land value, so the largest landowners, some of which farm thousands of acres, will have the biggest influence in the result. Critics have objected to this type of vote, saying they believe a one-vote-per-person system would be fairer.

Richard Harriman, a lawyer in Chico, called the effort to form the district a “Trojan Horse,” saying out-of-county landowners are seeking control of the area’s water “for purposes that are not for the public interest in Butte County.”

“It is absolute folly to think that the water is going to stay in Butte County, in that water bank, once the price of water is higher than the economic value of that water to agriculture. It will be gone. The water will follow the money,” Harriman said.

Farmer Ernie Washington said in a letter to the Chico Enterprise-Record that he initially was concerned about the potential to export water from the county.

“Conspiracy theories abound in the water world and I’m not naive enough to think that there aren’t plenty of outside interests with designs on our groundwater,” Washington wrote.

But he added that he’s satisfied measures are in place to address that “as well as it can be,” and believes the intent of those seeking to form the district is to “preserve our groundwater resource,” as well as farmers’ livelihood and way of life.

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Ian James

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December 2, 2023
Fox News debate with DeSantis puts Newsom on the defensive

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis turned their feud over blue and red state policies personal Thursday, clashing for more than 90 minutes over crime, taxes, COVID-19 pandemic policies, immigration, book bans and other divisive issues in an unorthodox debate that both men hoped would propel their national political ambitions.

California has “failed because of his leftist ideology,” DeSantis said of Newsom, whom he called a “slick politician.”

“There’s one thing … that we have in common,” Newsom said. “Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.”

The forum in Georgia between the liberal Democrat and the conservative Republican, hosted by Sean Hannity on Fox News, culminated months of shadow boxing between the two governors, who have used their states’ opposing partisan approaches to governing to attack each other.

Newsom was on the defensive for much of the debate as Hannity focused on taxes, crime, late-term abortions, California’s high gas prices and other topics on which conservatives believe they have the upper hand politically. Newsom responded by ignoring or reframing many of the questions.

DeSantis, who has seen his once-promising presidential campaign sag, recognized an opportunity to take down the leader of the most prominent Democratic-led state, which he attacked as a bastion of unhinged progressive policies that have led to lawlessness and mass departures.

Newsom, who may run for president in 2028, saw an opportunity to cement his reputation as a warrior for Democratic values, unafraid of Fox News and Republicans, as he savaged DeSantis’ vision of freedom as phony in a state where books are banned and abortion rights are curtailed.

The risks for both men were clear. Some viewers may see the obvious downgrade in DeSantis’ campaign as he battles a governor who is not running for president, instead of former President Trump, the overwhelming favorite to win the GOP nomination, or President Biden, the man he hopes to ultimately unseat. Newsom could come off as too eager for attention and overconfident in believing he could dispatch DeSantis, who came well prepared, in a debate moderated by Hannity.

It’s unclear whether Thursday’s debate will change minds on policy. But viewers got a clear contrast in a nation where differences are more often being played out in the states, which are increasingly dominated by a single party.

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Noah Bierman, Taryn Luna

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November 30, 2023
Speech is freer in California than in Florida, watchdog warns ahead of Newsom-DeSantis debate

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WASHINGTON —

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is due to debate California Gov. Gavin Newsom later this week about whose state offers a better model for the country, is leading an “assault on free expression in Florida” that is “almost without peer in recent U.S. history,” a watchdog warned in a pair of reports released Tuesday.

Pen America, which defends the rights of authors and others around the world to write and speak out without fear of government reprisals, has written detailed reviews comparing the two states’ recent policies and proposals on campus speech codes, book bans, curriculum fights, diversity and inclusion, internet freedom and other 1st Amendment issues in the interstate feud between DeSantis, a Republican, and Newsom, a Democrat.

The two men, whose states wield outsized influence on the right and left, are set to debate on Fox News Thursday night. DeSantis is hoping the debate jump-starts his flailing presidential campaign while Newsom has been trying to maintain his national stature amid speculation he will run in 2028.

The Pen report finds fault with both states’ policies but reserves its harshest judgment for DeSantis, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination as a culture warrior on the slogan that Florida is the state “where woke goes to die.” The states’ policies have implications beyond their borders; most of the bills the report analyzed have been adopted in other states, and California is home to tech and entertainment industries with global reach.

“Florida is setting an agenda of unprecedented censorship, rigging the system to favor the speech of those in power and silencing dissenting voices,” the Pen report states.

Authors, journalists and others who care about free expression have to pay attention to both states, in part because of their governors’ ambitions and willingness to push barriers at a time when states are leading most of the big culture war fights, said Suzanne Nossel, Pen America’s chief executive, in an interview.

“If you want to see where free speech is headed in this country, you have to take a close look at what they’re doing,” she said.

The report details several bills that have been proposed or passed in the Florida Legislature in recent years, most of which were supported by DeSantis.

They include the well-known bill that critics label “Don’t Say Gay,” which limits discussion of sexual orientation in classrooms, rules limiting the discussion of race in public colleges and universities, bills making it easier to ban books based on parental objections and those targeting mass protests with enhanced criminal penalties and drag shows.

Some of the bills have been blocked by courts, but the report argues that they still represent a threat to free expression because they create an immediate chilling effect, could ultimately withstand court challenges and are already inspiring new laws and proposals in Florida and elsewhere that could accomplish the same goals.

The drag show bill, which broadens the state’s obscenity law to apply to some live performances, was temporarily put on hold by a federal judge in central Florida this month after a restaurant sued.

“Regardless of how the courts rule, the Act has already chilled LGBTQ+ expression in the state,” the Pen authors wrote, citing canceled pride events in southeast Florida and central Florida and the dissolution of a drag storytime chapter in Miami.

DeSantis has accused critics of falsifying his record and creating “political theater,” insisting, for example, that he has expanded African American history requirements in Florida schools, even as the state placed limits on teaching about systemic racism. In the case of the drag show bill, he said it was targeted at “sexually explicit” performances.

“People can do what they want with some of that, but to have minors there, I mean, you’ll have situations where you’ll have like an 8-year-old girl there, where you have these like really explicit shows, and that is just inappropriate,” he said at a May news conference.

James Tager, research director of Pen America and co-author of the reports, said it was important to be “clear-eyed” and “send a warning signal” about Florida’s direction, given DeSantis’ political ambitions.

“Florida holds itself as a blueprint for a more of free way of living, championing the rhetoric of liberty,” Tager said. “Several of their significant proposals, the primary effect is to degrade and winnow down free expression rights in the state.”

Though Florida took the brunt of Pen’s criticism, California’s laws drew more limited scrutiny.

The report credits California with “unambiguous wins for free expression” for passing laws to protect journalists covering protests and restricting the ability of courts to allow rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials.

But it faults the state for what it labels well-intended misses, including a law that requires social media companies to produce regular reports on their content moderation to the state attorney general. The authors argue that the law, though ambiguous in defining the attorney general’s role, could give the government more power to regulate speech.

The report also cautions that a law intended to protect children on social media and other online platforms could chill free speech because it “requires businesses to predict any content or practice that lawmakers could consider to be ‘harmful’” to children. Tech industry and publishing groups have also opposed the law as overly broad, warning it could hinder content intended for adults.

Newsom said when he signed it that the state “will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation.”

The report also criticizes the state for a policy approved last year by the Board of Governors of California’s community college system that would evaluate college professors, in part, on their commitment to teaching anti-racist ideas untended to foster “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The policy has drawn a lawsuit from a group of professors.

“There is a difference between protecting a school’s or faculty member’s right to include DEI programming, and mandating that they do so, especially in higher education,” the authors wrote.

The organization labels the policy a “gag order,” arguing that it limits a professor’s academic freedom by forcing them to adopt the college system’s viewpoint.

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Noah Bierman

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November 28, 2023
California Assembly: Who’s in and who’s out for the most powerful posts
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SACRAMENTO —

California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) announced new legislative leadership on Tuesday, a key decision in his first year as leader of the lower house that could shape what becomes law in the nation’s most populous state.

Among the most significant changes is the announcement of a new majority leader: Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Davis). She replaces Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles) who was a key lieutenant to Rivas in his contentious year-long battle to become speaker that ended when he was sworn in this summer. Bryan now takes over as chair of the Natural Resources committee, a key panel on environmental policy.

Committee chairs have significant power to determine which bills live or die at the Capitol. New influential committee leaders announced Tuesday include Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), who will chair the powerful appropriations committee, and Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), who will oversee the budget committee. Both Wicks and Gabriel hold power over the state’s purse strings in their new roles, and are allies of Rivas, helping him secure the speakership during chaotic jockeying in the Capitol.

The tweaks to leadership could mean changes to come in Sacramento policymaking, with a renewed focus on affordability, safety and “strong public services,” said Rivas, who was sworn into the leadership role this summer after a contentious battle with former Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) who reluctantly gave up the position after seven years at the helm.

“The Assembly is unified and ready to deliver,” Rivas said in a statement. “That’s what Californians expect from their Legislature and that’s what this team will achieve.”

But not every recipient of a new leadership role supported Rivas, signaling that he and state lawmakers are willing to forgive and forget after this year’s political drama.

Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, a Democrat and longtime Rendon ally who is running for mayor of Sacramento, was named chair of the high profile public safety committee as California grapples with its crime response and leads the nation on issues like gun regulation. Tensions over how to respond to fentanyl and child sex trafficking split Democrats at the Capitol earlier this year.

Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego) also supported Rendon over Rivas and was named leader of the housing committee on Tuesday, now overseeing policy decisions on one the state’s top issues.

“We have transitioned and we are about looking forward,” Ward said in an interview Tuesday, adding that Rivas told him he was chosen in the role because of his background working on housing and homelessness issues as a member of the San Diego City Council.

Ward said in his new role, he will focus on removing barriers to housing production and making options more affordable for prospective homeowners and renters.

“There’s tension between state and local roles on housing. We do need to have stronger partnerships with local governments,” Ward said.

Freshman lawmaker Liz Ortega (D-San Leandro) will helm the labor and employment committee on the heels of a remarkable year for union backed policy. She was elected last year after working for years as a labor union leader.

Some of Rivas’ picks are newly-elected lawmakers with the potential to stay in office for another decade.

“I think it speaks to Speaker Rivas’ leadership to say we respect the people who have come before us, and now it’s time to build on that work and to think long-term about people who can be here in these positions for quite a number of years,” said Assemblymember Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City) who was elected last year and was named chair of the transportation committee Tuesday.

Other new appointments include:
- Assemblymember Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg) as speaker pro tem.
- Assemblymember Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) as assistant majority leader.
- Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) as chair of the judiciary committee.
- Assemblymember Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) as chair of governmental organization.
- Assemblymember Alex Lee (D-San Jose) as the chair of human services.
- Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) as chair of privacy and consumer protection.
- Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) as chair of water, parks and wildlife.
- Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Alameda) as chair of the health committee.
This story will be updated.
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Mackenzie Mays

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November 21, 2023
Opinion: California’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising — and we’re not even counting them all

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California has committed to substantially reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2045. The pledge is key to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s claims of climate leadership, which featured prominently in his recent visits to China and the United Nations.

But the California Air Resources Board recently released a preliminary greenhouse gas inventory suggesting the state’s emissions increased slightly last year compared with the previous year. This is of course bad news, since addressing climate change requires deep and swift emissions reductions.

What I’m even more concerned about, however, is that the state’s greenhouse gas inventory undercounts emissions in the first place. Although the issue seldom gets attention, California’s inventory excludes emissions from a variety of sources, including wildfires and industrial sectors such as shipping, aviation and biofuels.

Imagine a smoker who promises to quit but continues to make broad exceptions for smoking at work and social events. Regardless of what the smoker tells the doctor, their lungs will reflect the truth.

California’s greenhouse gas inventory is likewise not just going in the wrong direction but also ignoring a lot of harmful sources of emissions. Indeed, the state even measures and lists some of these emissions in its reports. But they’re not counted toward its overall greenhouse gas footprint, which it uses to attest to its efforts to combat climate change.

These omitted emissions have serious consequences: Relying on CARB’s estimates alone, the state’s reported greenhouse gas footprint would be about 20% greater if it included its omitted emissions. And that doesn’t include the emissions the agency doesn’t even list in its inventory, such as those from wildfires, which are largely human-caused, measurable and manageable.

The omissions also have repercussions for California communities. Many of the industries whose greenhouse gas emissions are excluded from the official inventory — including shipping, aviation, refineries and biofuels — produce additional pollutants that affect nearby communities. People living near these facilities are harmed by that pollution regardless of whether officials choose to count those facilities’ emissions. Particularly in communities with historical and continuing environmental injustices, these omissions compound the problem.

The city of Stockton, for example, agreed to produce a greenhouse gas inventory as part of a settlement of a lawsuit alleging that its general plan did not adequately consider environmental impacts. Yet its greenhouse gas inventory excludes emissions from the very industries that contribute to local air pollution and environmental injustices. In fact, the emissions excluded by the city are four times greater than those it reported.

These emissions omissions are not unique to California. Indeed, national governments exclude international shipping and aviation emissions from reports to the United Nations required by the Paris agreement, relying partly on outdated and politicized methodologies.

While the Paris agreement allows for such omissions, it doesn’t prevent countries from improving their accounting methods. What’s more, subnational governments such as California’s are not parties to the agreement and therefore not bound to its methodologies. In fact, unlike its national counterparts, California once counted transportation emissions from biofuels such as ethanol but reclassified them in 2016.

Nor is this issue confined to governments: Corporate emitters are also part of the problem. One study found that technology companies’ greenhouse gas declarations undercounted their emissions, sometimes by orders of magnitude. And corporate “net zero” pledges often arbitrarily count emissions in ways that don’t amount to actual reductions.

What’s the solution? Only a full account of greenhouse gas emissions can allow us to appropriately attribute responsibility to each emitter and determine its progress in reducing its contributions to climate change. We need greenhouse gas accounting systems that are rigorous, complete and interoperable.

This is a daunting task but not a hopeless one. Senate Bill 253, which Newsom recently signed into law, requires large corporations operating in California to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and include emissions throughout their supply chains. That’s critical: Disclosing emissions across supply chains will help hold emitters responsible for their complete greenhouse gas footprints.

While SB 253 is a very good first step, the Air Resources Board should apply the same standard to the state’s greenhouse gas inventory. Measuring California’s complete footprint requires including upstream and downstream refinery emissions as well as those from aviation, shipping, biofuels and wildfires.

Getting greenhouse gas accounting right is ultimately crucial to dealing with climate change. Until governments and corporations completely and accurately account for their contributions to the problem, their promised solutions will fall short.

Leehi Yona is a JD-PhD candidate and Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University whose research has focused on greenhouse gas emissions accounting.

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Leehi Yona

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November 20, 2023
Caltrans long aware of conditions under 10 Freeway that fueled fire

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The state was long aware of conditions under Interstate 10 where a massive fire Saturday severely damaged the freeway south of downtown Los Angeles — with Caltrans inspectors on site as recently as Oct. 6, according to state officials, tenants and a lawyer for the company leasing the land.

The fire was fueled by wood pallets stored under the freeway and is being investigated as an arson.

The plot of land was leased by Caltrans to a private company that subleased it to small blue-collar businesses at much higher rents.

For years, a pallet distributor, a recycler, a mechanic shop and a garment factory supplier operated between the freeway pillars on East 14th Street a block east of South Alameda Street. Along the perimeters, homeless people camped and lighted fires to keep warm.

The conditions did not raise any apparent alarm bells among state officials who regularly inspected the site. Google Earth photos from January 2023 and March 2022 show dozens of columns of pallets stacked two stories high, amid piles of tires, wood boxes, cardboard and old vehicles, all visible from four streets and a freeway offramp.

“Caltrans staff inspect all airspace lease sites at least annually to check for potential safety hazards and lease violations,” said Eric Menjivar, a spokesperson for Caltrans District 7, which maintains state highways in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Areas under and next to the freeway are considered airspace.

“Staff also monitor what is placed or stored on site by the tenant. If deficiencies are noted, Caltrans staff notifies the tenant for remedy. The State Fire Marshal also inspects regularly for fire and life safety.”

Menjivar said Caltrans inspected the property Oct. 6 after Caltrans had filed a lawsuit to remove its tenant, Apex Development Inc., for noncompliance with the lease. The suit, filed in September, said the company had not paid its rent in more than a year and had illegally sublet the land to a host of small businesses.

The California Department of Transportation has not provided inspection reports requested by the Times.

Jose Luis Villamil Rodriguez, who started renting a spot on the property from Apex in 2011, said he watched Caltrans inspectors regularly come to the site.

“They would even take photos,” he said. “Everyone knew what was under the freeway, they saw the pallet yard and so I’m pretty sure they were aware of it.”

Rodriguez said the pallet yard business had been under the freeway for about seven years. He said the owner was constantly storing and moving the pallets. Rodriguez said he never interacted with the inspectors. Out of caution, Rodriguez said he had fire extinguishers at his job site. “Whether others didn’t, I wouldn’t know,” he added.

Caltrans had rented the 48,000-square-foot lot to Apex and its owner, Ahmad Anthony Nowaid, starting in 2008. Under Apex’s lease agreement, the property could be used only for parking operable vehicles and “open storage”; other uses required the approval of Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration, something the company does not appear to have secured. Apex was also not allowed the storage of inoperable vehicles, flammable materials or other hazards.

The lease agreement between Caltrans and Apex was filed in court as part of the state’s lawsuit against the company for unpaid rent. As of September, Apex owed nearly $80,000 in back rent on the property that burned.

A court hearing in the suit is scheduled for early 2024.

Apex, through its attorney Mainak D’Attaray, confirmed that Caltrans had inspected the lot at East 14th Street at least once a year. The lawyer also disputed that the various small businesses renting from Apex were there illegally; Caltrans “was fully aware of the sublessees and their operations,” he said in a statement.

The attorney argued that state officials were wrongly blaming the company and knew about homeless encampments and the overall conditions at the site.

“Even the State of California’s Fire Marshall inspected the premises,” D’Attaray said in a statement. “Apex is sympathetic to the loss of property and the adverse impact the fire has caused the people of Los Angeles. But Apex was not involved in the fire. Apex is being unfairly scape-goated for something over which it had no control.”

The lot at the edge of the Fashion District is one of five that Caltrans had rented to Apex’s owner, Nowaid. Caltrans had filed eviction proceedings for all five properties, saying Nowaid’s firm owed a total of at least $620,000 in unpaid rent.

Earlier this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized Apex and its owner without specifically identifying Nowaid.

“This guy and this organization, whoever the members of that particular organization are, have been bad actors,” Newsom said at a news conference. “They stopped paying their rent, they’re out of compliance, and as was stated yesterday … they have been subleasing this site to at least five, maybe as many as six tenants, without authorization from Caltrans or authorization from our federal partners.”

D’Attaray said that the eviction suits were retaliation by Caltrans for a lawsuit that Apex had filed in June, accusing the agency of interfering with his business.

He said the governor and Mayor Karen Bass were trying “to excuse their own failures to adequately address the public safety issues caused by the unhoused.”

Apex had repeatedly called the Los Angeles Fire Department to report fires started by homeless people who pitched tents around the perimeter of the lot, D’Attaray said. He claimed that the city’s fire and police departments responded “dismissively.”

“The unhoused persons camping along the fence line of the premises were allowed to remain and accumulate all types of refuse and materials over which Apex had no control,” D’Attaray said in the statement.

A spokesperson for Newsom rejected the idea that the governor’s statements were off base.

“CalFire currently believes the fire was caused by arson — the criminal act of deliberately setting fire to property — in a fenced-off area that Apex was responsible for maintaining while they continued to assert rights under the lease,” the spokesperson said.

A representative for Bass did not respond to requests for comment.

A Caltrans engineer, who asked to withhold his name because he was not authorized to speak, said that it was the state agency that should have seen this coming.

“Caltrans has known about this for a long time,” the engineer told the Times earlier this week. “They have permitted lessees to store flammable stuff underneath these freeways for decades. They’ve had a couple of fires in the last three years that have affected columns, but inspectors can’t completely get underneath the bridge to make a thorough inspection because of all the junk.”

In Atlanta, a similar fire in 2017 caused a portion of the 85 Freeway to collapse after a 39-year-old homeless man who police said had been smoking crack set fire to an upholstered chair on top of a shopping cart.

The fire ignited combustible materials stored under the freeway. Federal investigators found the Georgia Department of Transportation partly responsible.

In an alert sent out to transportation agencies across the country, the National Transportation Safety Board warned: “Although catastrophic fires fueled by materials stored underneath bridges are relatively rare events, the loss of this structure demonstrates what can happen if bridge owners are not vigilant about monitoring and controlling such materials.”

The I-85 closure snarled commuter traffic on the region’s busiest throroughfares for six weeks. In response, Caltrans wrote up a policy directive directly based on that incident that prohibited the storage of flammable materials under its bridges and required access for bridge inspections.

It is not clear if it was enforced.

Assemblymember Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) said the fire on Saturday “should have never happened.

“There’s already protocols in place,” he said. He praised the governor’s response to the fire and his administration, which has pushed the effort to “Fix the 10.”

Santiago said he felt confident that the governor’s office and Caltrans would provide information about the state’s leases, including a review of litigation and enforcement mechanisms.

“Once we get the information there needs to be strong accountability mechanisms in place to prevent anything like this from ever happening again and putting the public at risk.”

Carina Quinto, who runs a mobile mechanic shop out of the freeway underpass, was bewildered by officials. She had been watching news reports about the fire and was surprised to hear officials say they had no idea what was going on under the underpass.

“Supposedly the city didn’t know the kind of businesses that were running under the freeway. They knew exactly what we were doing,” she said. Someone from sanitation came regularly to check that oil was properly disposed, she said.

When asked for proof of the visit, she said, it burned up in the fire.

Times staff writers Taryn Luna and Thomas Curwen contributed to this report.

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Rachel Uranga, Matt Hamilton, Ruben Vives

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November 16, 2023
California’s population of unauthorized immigrants has dropped, report says

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WASHINGTON —

The California population of immigrants lacking lawful status decreased by 150,000 between 2017 and 2021, but the state continues to have the highest number — 1.9 million — of unauthorized residents among the states.

According to a report published Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, only two states saw an increase in such residents during the same period: Florida, which increased by 80,000 people, and Washington, which increased by 60,000.

Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois follow California as states with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations. Such immigrants have become less geographically concentrated, however, with those six states being home to 56% of that population in the U.S., down from 80% in 1990.

The Pew Research Center analyzed the most current data from the U.S. Census Bureau and government surveys such as the American Community Survey to estimate the size and characteristics of that population.

Among those counted as unauthorized immigrants by Pew are more than 2 million people with temporary permission to be in the U.S., including through pending asylum petitions, temporary protected status and the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Across the country, 10.5 million immigrants lacked legal status in 2021, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007, but up slightly from a low of 10.2 million in 2019.

Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew, said the rebound is due in part to pent-up requests for U.S. entry after strict enforcement during the Trump administration and then pandemic closures.

The foreign-born population made up about 14% of the country’s total population in 2021. Between 2007 and 2021, the lawful immigrant population grew by a quarter and the number of naturalized U.S. citizens grew substantially, accounting for about half of all immigrants in the country.

Passel said naturalizations probably increased because of restrictions on legal immigrants, as well as the desire of immigrants to vote in presidential elections since 2008. After U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reopened following a pandemic closure, nearly a million immigrants became naturalized citizens in fiscal year 2022, the third-highest number on record.

But the Pew report notes that the new estimates don’t reflect changes since migrant arrests and expulsions started increasing in March 2021, later reaching historic highs.

The number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico decreased by 900,000 to 4.1 million in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of people from nearly every other region in the world grew rapidly, including from Venezuela, India and Canada. Immigrants from East Asia and India probably drove the increase in Washington, Passel said.

Passel said the decrease in Mexican immigrants partly explains the overall decrease in unauthorized immigrants in California. That‘s because many Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico while fewer have entered the U.S., he said.

“In some ways it’s a status quo, but I think it’s notable that the sources are really changing quite a bit,” Passel said of the countries where immigrants were born. “We’re seeing some growth from almost every region of the world — not huge, but some — and the continued decline in Mexico as a source. I think that’s likely to continue for the next couple of years.”

During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described the changes reflected at the southern U.S. border as a global phenomenon.

“We are facing economic, political and climate instability across the world, exacerbated in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic — instability that is fueling the greatest level of global migration since World War II,” Mayorkas said.

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Andrea Castillo

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November 16, 2023
Gavin Newsom is mesmerized by the growth of driverless cars. Other California Democrats, not so much

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SHANGHAI —

California Gov. Gavin Newsom walked out of the Tesla gigafactory in China last month feeling jazzed about the future.

A future where people do a lot less driving, instead being whisked around by autonomous cars and flying taxis. A future where, he said, the “entire transportation system is completely reorganized.”

“I think it’s going to come very fast,” Newsom said to reporters on the last day of his trip to China promoting clean energy partnerships with California.

“With AI in particular aiding this advancement, I think it’s just going to explode and you’re going to start seeing driverless flying cars as well.”

Newsom made it clear that he’s committed to keeping California the global leader in the development of autonomous technology and said the state shouldn’t “cede the future” to other countries or states.

A tech-friendly, entrepreneurial streak has been one of Newsom’s hallmarks since he entered politics. As lieutenant governor in 2011, he famously set up his San Francisco office in a private hub of tech start-ups. Newsom boasts of having bought one of the first Teslas ever sold, and has had a longstanding relationship with Elon Musk, whom he calls “one of the world’s great innovators.”

But the governor’s effusive comments about autonomous vehicles come as the technology is causing outrage in some California cities, putting Newsom in conflict with many fellow Democrats who are calling for more oversight of the robotic cars on public roads. He’s clashing with mayors and other local officials who want more control over the expansion of robotaxis in their cities, as well as with state lawmakers who believe California’s system for regulating autonomous vehicles is insufficient.

Martha Hubert writes a message opposing robotaxi expansion on Aug. 10 in San Francisco.

(Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)

The friction is growing as autonomous vehicle companies ramp up their lobbying in Sacramento. Cruise, Waymo, Motional and the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Assn. collectively spent about $2.4 million on lobbying the state government in the first nine months of this year — more than three times the $671,579 they spent lobbying in all of last year, according to disclosures filed with the Secretary of State. Much of that increase is due to a huge jump in spending by Waymo, the business owned by Google’s parent company that operates robotaxis in San Francisco and Santa Monica, with plans to expand to other parts of L.A. this month.

Skepticism from local officials has intensified since a Cruise robotaxi dragged a person down a San Francisco street last month, and the company allegedly failed to disclose footage of the wreck. The DMV suspended Cruise’s permits and the General Motors-owned company announced it is suspending U.S. operations while it works to “rebuild public trust.” It recalled its autonomous fleet to perform a software update.

On Nov. 1, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wrote a fiery letter to state regulators saying the city wants more say in regulating driverless taxis and she criticized the state for a lack of attention to “public safety, road safety, and other serious concerns.”

“To date, local jurisdictions like Los Angeles have had little to no input in AV deployment and are already seeing significant harm and disruption,” Bass wrote to the state Public Utilities Commission, which approved a massive expansion of robotaxis in August.

Newsom appoints the members of the Public Utilities Commission and oversees the Department of Motor Vehicles, the two agencies tasked with regulating autonomous vehicles. He told reporters he agreed with the DMV’s decision to ban Cruise from San Francisco streets following the crash that left a pedestrian seriously injured.

Even before the Cruise debacle, city officials in San Francisco criticized the state’s move to grow the presence of autonomous vehicles. The fire chief complained that robotaxis are a danger to emergency response because they stop in traffic, pull up too close to firetrucks that are unloading equipment and block firehouse driveways. The police officers union also raised concerns about their expansion. After the Public Utilities Commission approved the expansion, San Francisco’s city attorney filed motions asking it to reverse course, which the commission declined to do.

Now a state lawmaker is pressing the DMV for more information on how it permits autonomous vehicles, how it addresses safety concerns and why it suspended Cruise’s permit. The formal inquiry by state Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) could portend hearings or legislation on autonomous vehicles after the Legislature reconvenes in January.

“All of us in public service would like to intervene and prevent things from happening and not have tragedy dictate an acceleration of remedies. But if we don’t hurry that’s what’s going to happen,” Cortese said in an interview.

He said California’s structure of having two agencies tasked with regulating driverless cars is problematic.

“I believe we need a single executive agency that deals with autonomous vehicles much like the FAA deals with air travel, commercial and private,” Cortese said. “We don’t have the infrastructure set up to monitor what’s going on or hold people accountable.”

Newsom defended the state’s oversight during his conversation with reporters outside the Shanghai Tesla plant.

“The DMV has built a whole new shop in terms of organizing around making sure people are safe,” he said. “But autonomy is the future.”

An electric Jaguar I-Pace car outfitted with Waymo full self-driving technology drives through Santa Monica on Feb. 21.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

The DMV launched an investigation in 2021 into whether Tesla falsely markets its autonomous technology. The company brands it as “full self-driving” but California does not regulate Teslas as autonomous vehicles, so the company doesn’t have to report crash data to the state. The DMV’s investigation has yielded no public results in more than 2½ years, to the frustration of some state lawmakers.

The governor also clashed with lawmakers over autonomous vehicles earlier this year when he vetoed a bill to require human safety drivers in self-driving big-rig trucks — a measure that sailed through the Legislature with bipartisan support. Newsom said the bill was unnecessary because of the state’s existing system for regulating the evolving technology.

“DMV continuously monitors the testing and operations of autonomous vehicles on California roads and has the authority to suspend or revoke permits as necessary to protect the public’s safety,” he wrote in the veto message.

Peter Finn, a vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which sponsored the bill to require human drivers on autonomous trucks, said the union will keep pushing because both safety and jobs are at stake.

“We’re not backing away from this fight. We’re going to double down in terms of pursuing fair and responsible guardrails to this technology,” he said.

He called Newsom “completely out of touch with California residents” on the issue of autonomous vehicles.

There’s no sign that Newsom’s zeal for automotive innovation will subside. In addition to touring the Shanghai Tesla factory, while in China Newsom test drove a hybrid SUV made by Chinese manufacturer BYD. He took his hands off the wheel and waved to reporters as the car went into automated mode and rotated in a full 360-degree turn.

“This is another leap of the technology. Next level,” Newsom marveled from behind the wheel of the vehicle, which played the Eagles’ song “Hotel California” on the sound system when he turned it on.

Gov. Gavin Newsom test drives an SUV with autonomous features made by BYD during a visit to Shenzhen, China, on Oct. 24.

(Laurel Rosenhall / Los Angeles Times)

The governor said he first experienced driverless technology many years ago during a visit to Google with company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Four years ago, at the Sears Point raceway in Sonoma County, Newsom said he rode in an “Audi going 160 miles an hour with no one in the driver’s seat.”

Newsom also expressed excitement about aviation innovation underway in California. Drone-like electric planes are being tested across the state by Silicon Valley tech companies pitching the vision of clean, quiet flying taxis to get people off clogged freeways. Two companies, Archer and Joby, plan to launch with pilots while a company called Wisk is developing an autonomous air taxi.

Joby reported hiring a Sacramento lobbying firm for the first time in July, and one of its lobbyists, Michael Picker, is a former president of the Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxis and rideshare companies.

Asked if he had safety concerns with autonomous technology, the governor echoed industry talking points that human drivers who can get drunk or sleepy behind the wheel are more dangerous than driverless cars.

“I think we’re gonna look back in 20 to 30 years and go, why were we allowed to drive? And allow 30-plus-thousand Americans to die every single year in accidents?” Newsom said. “There’s a precision with the technology, but it has to be worked through. I just think it’s mesmerizing, the change that’s about to come.”

Times staff writer Anabel Sosa contributed to this report.

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Laurel Rosenhall

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November 12, 2023
Column: Newsom gets no California love for his political ambitions. Maybe he should try elsewhere

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Bill Clinton was a man of large appetite and no small ambition when he served as Arkansas governor, a job he assumed at the age of 32.

So it was hardly a surprise when, 14 years later, Clinton launched a bid for president.

There was skepticism at the time and some carping of the too-big-for-his-britches variety. But that soon faded with the growing excitement of the 1992 election and the opening of Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters, as Skip Rutherford, an old confidant, recalled.

Gavin Newsom can only sigh with envy.

California’s governor is not running for president. Take him at his word.

Filing deadlines have passed in the key early-voting states of Nevada and New Hampshire, and Newsom must know that a run against President Biden — his fellow Democrat — would almost surely fail, destroying Newsom’s political future in the process.

Still, the gallivanting governor has acted very much like a presidential candidate, striding the global stage and trolling the GOP’s White House contestants whenever he has the chance. Maybe he’s positioning himself for a run after his term ends in January 2027.

Either way, California voters are not pleased.

A Los Angeles Times/UC Berkeley poll released this week found Newsom’s approval rating sinking to the lowest point of his nearly five years in office, with 44% of respondents having a favorable view of his job performance and 49% disapproving.

There may be several explanations; like barnacles on a ship, negatives tend to accumulate the longer a politician stays in office.

Some on the left are disappointed with Newsom’s approach to the state’s homelessness and mental health crises. Some environmentalists are unhappy with the governor’s water policy. (Republicans never could stand Newsom.)

But probably the biggest reason for voter discontent is the governor’s political wandering eye.

“A lot of people don’t think California is doing well,” said Mark DiCamillo, who oversaw the poll for The Times and Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

“There’s homelessness and now the budget deficit,” DiCamillo went on. “There’s a lot of issues that need attention and they seem to be getting worse — or at least not better — and he’s off doing his own thing.”

The ill will is nothing new. Govs. Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson both sagged in the polls when they stinted on their day job to run off and seek the presidency.

Maybe it’s a California thing.

Nationwide, two sitting governors have been elected president in the last 90-plus years: Clinton and Texas’ George W. Bush. Both ran with the blessing of the folks back home.

Rutherford, who oversaw the planning of Clinton’s presidential library, said Arkansas voters were captivated as they watched “all the people who came in to work” for the campaign, “all the national press coming in and out,” and “it became a source of, ‘Wow, we got a guy who now has a shot to win this thing.’”

Bush, whose father had been president, was coy even as he used his 1998 gubernatorial reelection campaign to position himself for a White House bid. He won his second term in a landslide and soon enough was traveling the country in pursuit of the presidency.

Texans didn’t seem to mind.

A November 1999 poll, conducted by the Scripps Howard news service, found 72% of those surveyed approved of Bush’s performance as governor. The state’s most powerful Democrat, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, even endorsed Bush for president in 2000, burnishing the Republican’s bipartisan credentials in a way that’s unimaginable in today’s age of impermeable partisanship.

“He was just a chatty, friendly character,” said Bruce Buchanan, a longtime Bush watcher and presidential scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. “Everybody who got close to him came away feeling that way, whether they happened to agree with his politics or not.”

Maybe Californians aren’t all that excited about installing one of their own in the Oval Office.

After yielding two presidents in the last half-century, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and two House speakers of recent vintage, Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, perhaps national political celebrity isn’t what it used to be.

Things may be different in Florida, which has never produced a president.

Even though Ron DeSantis is struggling there — a recent poll put him a whopping 39 percentage points behind former President Trump in Florida’s Republican primary — voters haven’t necessarily soured on their governor, now in his second and final term.

In a recent trial heat for the 2026 gubernatorial race, DeSantis’ wife, Casey, had more than twice the support of any other potential candidate tested, said Mike Binder, a political science professor and pollster at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

“Clearly, the DeSantis name brand still has a lot of value to it,” Binder said.

Maybe Newsom can ask Florida’s governor for pointers on running for president without alienating his home state when the two archrivals — one seeking the presidency, the other kinda-sorta but not really — debate at the end of the month.

Either that or Newsom could start over someplace else like, say, Democratic-leaning Rhode Island. There has never been a president elected from the Ocean State.

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Mark Z. Barabak

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November 10, 2023
The Democrats’ Most Surprising Southern Foothold

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The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature.

What Republicans don’t occupy is Kentucky’s most powerful post. The state’s governor is Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019 who is hoping to win a second term tomorrow. Operatives in both parties think he might, but the governor’s in a close race with his Republican opponent, Daniel Cameron, the state’s 37-year-old attorney general. Whether Beshear can stave him off will determine if Democrats maintain one of their most surprising footholds in southern politics.

Beshear, 45, owes his success in a deep-red state to a combination of competent governance, political good fortune, and family lineage. His father, Steve, was a popular two-term governor who governed as a moderate and won the admiration of fellow Democrats for implementing the Affordable Care Act in the face of conservative opposition. The Republican governor whom Andy Beshear defeated in 2019, Matt Bevin, was widely disliked, even by many in his own party. Soon after taking office, Beshear earned praise for his steady leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and then later in his tenure during a series of natural catastrophes—deadly tornadoes, historic flooding, and ice storms. The crises have made the governor a near-constant presence on local news in the state, where allies and opponents alike usually refer to him by his first name. “I joke that Andy Beshear has 150 percent name ID” in Kentucky, Representative Morgan McGarvey, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, told me. “It’s because everybody knows who he is. And they actually know him.”

Major economic-development and infrastructure projects have also boosted the governor’s reelection bid—Beshear has taken advantage of billions in federal dollars that have flowed to Kentucky from legislation signed by President Joe Biden and backed by the state’s most powerful Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell.

Cameron is a onetime McConnell protégé who would be the state’s first Black governor if elected. In the campaign’s closing weeks, Cameron has touted an endorsement by Trump and tried to tie Beshear to Biden, who is deeply unpopular in Kentucky. The governor has endorsed Biden’s reelection, though he’s generally kept his distance from the president. At the start of one debate, Beshear, who had recently signed legislation legalizing sports gambling, “wagered” that Cameron would mention Biden’s name at least 16 times in their hour together onstage. Cameron was either unfazed or unable to improvise: He mentioned Biden’s name four times in the next 90 seconds.

Nationalizing the governor’s race is probably Cameron’s smartest bet in a state like Kentucky. But even Republicans concede that Beshear has done a good job of building a distinct brand during the past four years. “He ended up being able to operate in some nonideological arenas—the tornadoes, the floods, even COVID while it was going on,” Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant in Kentucky, told me. As they did for governors in most states, televised briefings during the pandemic allowed Beshear to connect with his constituents on a daily basis for weeks. The dynamic generally helped Republican leaders in blue states, such as Phil Scott in Vermont, and vice versa in Kentucky. “Anytime you come into people’s lives like that every day during an unusual situation, it does have an impact,” Jennings said. “You seem more familiar than the average politician that you see every now and again.” Since the beginning of 2020, just one governor—Democrat Steve Sisolak in Nevada—has lost a reelection bid.

Read: America’s bluest state loves its Republican governor

Beshear has benefitted from incumbency in other ways as well. He’s raised and spent far more money than Cameron, which allows him to blanket the state in ads both positive and negative. He’s used ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings to tout job-creating projects. In September, Beshear placed the state’s first legal sports bet at the Churchill Downs Racetrack, a launch that was timed explicitly for the start of football season and implicitly for the start of his reelection campaign.

Among the issues Beshear has prioritized is abortion, a departure for a Democrat in a culturally conservative southern state. The procedure has been illegal in Kentucky since the overturning of Roe v. Wade triggered a statewide ban. But Democrats sensed a political opening last year after Kentucky voters rejected an amendment that would have stipulated that the state constitution did not protect abortion rights. The vote suggested that in Kentucky, as in other red states, such as Kansas, abortion rights have bipartisan support. “It’s a huge advantage for Andy,” former Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat who served for eight terms in the House before retiring last year, told me. “It has become a voting issue for the pro-choice side. It generates turnout and it moves some voters.”

One of Beshear’s TV ads features a woman who was raped by her stepfather at age 12 and who criticizes Cameron for his support of Kentucky’s abortion ban, which contains no exceptions for rape or incest. “I’m speaking out because women and girls need to have options. Daniel Cameron would give us none,” the woman says. After the ad began running, Cameron said that if the legislature presented him with a bill adding exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, he would sign it.

For Cameron, the Republican who has the best chance of winning him votes is Trump. The former president released a recorded endorsement last week, but he has not come to Kentucky to campaign for the attorney general. “We would accept any and all visitors to help get the vote out,” Sean Southard, a spokesperson for Cameron, told me when I asked whether the campaign had wanted a Trump rally.

What role, if any, race might play in the outcome is also a question mark. Cameron denounced a pair of ads by the Beshear-backing Black Voters Matter Action PAC that refer to him as “Uncle Daniel Cameron” and place his image alongside that of Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Django Unchained. “All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” a narrator says in a radio ad, urging a vote for Beshear, who is white.

Silas House: A warning from a Democrat in a red state

To Republicans, Beshear is something of an accidental governor. After winning his race for attorney general in 2015 by slightly more than 2,000 votes, he defeated Bevin four years later by a margin nearly as minuscule (about 5,000 votes). The GOP-controlled legislature drives policy and can override his veto with a simple majority. “The Republican supermajorities have essentially stuffed him in a locker,” Jennings said. But, he argued, their dominance ultimately helps Beshear politically because they’ve prevented him from building a record to the left of where Kentucky voters want to go. “If left to his own devices, he’d be far more liberal on policy,” Jennings said. “In some ways, they save him from himself.”

As entrenched as they are in Kentucky’s legislature and congressional delegation, Republicans have struggled to win, and keep, the governorship. They’ve held the top job for just three four-year terms in the past eight decades, and both of their recent winners, Bevin and Ernie Fletcher, lost bids for reelection (each time to a Beshear). “What’s clear is that people view the governor differently,” McGarvey told me.

Both Republicans and Democrats I spoke with told me that they believed the GOP’s strength throughout the state would eventually extend to the governor’s office. Whether that happens tomorrow or in another four years is less clear. Private polls show Beshear with a small but not insurmountable lead, according to operatives in both parties who described them on the condition of anonymity. Public surveys have been limited, but they show a tightening race as well. Democrats close to the Beshear campaign told me that although they felt good about the race, a Cameron victory would not surprise them given the GOP’s overall advantage.

Yarmuth was a bit more confident. Sensing a lack of enthusiasm on the Republican side, he held out hope for a more convincing Beshear win that might even help Democrats in down-ballot races. But he, too, was skeptical that Democrats would be able to maintain their unlikely grip on Kentucky’s governorship much longer. “I would bet,” the former representative told me, “that it’ll be hard for a Democrat past Andy.”

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Russell Berman

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November 6, 2023
Healthcare minimum wage expected to cost $4 billion in first year as California budget deficit looms

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SACRAMENTO —

When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that set a first-in-the-nation minimum wage for healthcare workers, three words in a bill analysis foretold potential concerns about its cost: “Fiscal impact unknown.”

Now, three weeks after Newsom signed SB 525 into law — giving medical employees at least $25 an hour, including support staff such as cleaners and security guards — his administration has an estimated price tag: $4 billion in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone.

Half of that will come directly from the state’s general fund, while the other half will be paid for by federal funds designated for providers of Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, according to Newsom’s Department of Finance.

SB 525 is one of the most expensive laws California has seen in years and comes as the state faces a $14-billion budget deficit that could grow larger, if revenue projections continue to fall short.

The costly legislation — promoted by unions as a way to curb the healthcare worker shortage and in turn improve patient care — was signed into law even as Newsom has warned about the state’s shaky financial future, vetoing dozens of bills last month in the name of cost savings.

“With our state facing continuing economic risk and revenue uncertainty, it is important to remain disciplined when considering bills with significant fiscal implications, such as this measure,” Newsom said repeatedly in veto messages, rejecting some bills that had far lower cost projections than SB 525.

Among the many proposals that Newsom vetoed citing financial concerns was a bill that would have required that colleges pay for diagnostic assessments for students with disabilities, which would have cost the state $5 million annually, and a bill that would have expanded cash assistance for aged, blind and disabled immigrants, which would have cost the state at least $100 million.

Unknowns remain about implementation of the new wide-reaching minimum wage law, including the exact long-term costs, in part because of significant amendments made to the bill in the final days of the legislation session — a result of a rare truce between union and health-industry leaders deemed necessary to its passage.

Newsom officials declined to give The Times a cost estimate reflecting those amendments when the governor signed the bill last month. But the amendments were expected to significantly soften the immediate financial impact to the state and hospitals, since gradual wage schedules were introduced in lieu of an instantaneous increase for all.

Despite the unknowns, Democrats in the state Legislature — including some who were first hesitant about potential costs — were quick to pass the legislation after a deal was made between powerful interest groups.

The bill originally aimed to increase the minimum wage to $25 per hour for all healthcare employees starting Jan. 1. The opposition estimated that would have cost up to $8 billion annually.

While leaders of appropriations committees killed bills based on cost in September, rejecting measures that cost millions less than SB 525, the healthcare minimum wage bill cleared that key fiscal hurdle even as the Department of Finance opposed it, citing “significant economic impacts.”

It’s unclear whether other state programs will be cut to make room for the wage hikes, but expect state lawmakers to rush to write bills when the Legislature returns in January to try to address some financial concerns.

Unlike a law passed in 2016 that mandated a $15-per-hour minimum wage statewide, the healthcare worker bill does not currently include any mechanism that allows the state to delay wage hikes during economic downturns.

“This is an important law to ensure California has a robust healthcare workforce. We’re working with legislative leadership and stakeholders on accompanying legislation to account for state budget conditions and revenues,” Newsom spokesperson Alex Stack said on Friday when asked about cost concerns surrounding the bill.

The $4-billion estimate could change when the Legislative Analyst’s Office releases its annual fiscal outlook expected later this month. The cost is only expected to grow in the future, as more groups of workers become eligible for raises.

The latest estimated cost to the state reflects pay raises expected to go to half a million healthcare workers who provide services to Medi-Cal patients, plus 26,000 employees at state-owned facilities.

But the cost to the state could decrease if hospitals pay a bigger share of labor costs, said Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, who was involved in shaping the policy. She pointed to billions already set aside for Medi-cal providers through revenue from a tax on managed healthcare organizations as one way to “help manage the impact of increased labor costs.”

“SEIU California has committed to working with the administration and the Legislature to ensure safeguards are in place to guarantee that this critical measure is taken in a way that preserves California’s fiscal health, just as we did when negotiating the last statewide minimum wage increase,” Orr said. “This is how you make progress — through flexibility and compromise in achieving shared goals.”

In a statement, David Simon, spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, which ultimately supported the bill, called the plan that Newsom signed a “better, more measured” approach to raising wages than past efforts, which the organization worried would hurt rural hospitals already struggling financially and potentially pass costs onto patients.

Like Orr, Simon signaled more work to come.

“As far as any future work related to this issue, we are committed to working with the Legislature and the governor to advance the joint goals of SB 525: investing in our state’s healthcare workforce and preserving access to healthcare,” Simon said.

Under the law, workers at large healthcare facilities will earn $23 an hour starting in June, $24 an hour in 2025 and $25 in 2026. That applies to all staff, including launderers and hospital gift shop workers.

Employees at independent rural hospitals and facilities that serve high rates of Medicare and Medi-Cal patients will see $18 an hour next year and won’t reach $25 an hour until 2033. Other smaller workplaces are required to pay employees $21 an hour next year, reaching $25 an hour in 2028.

Newsom supporters see the legislation as bold national leadership amid labor unrest and worker strikes across industries, and as a more organized way to address local demands for $25 per hour already moving ahead in cities across California. His critics question if he approved it too soon without a concrete plan in order to gain political favor.

Labor unions have long held outsize power in the California Legislature, but their wins this year were remarkable. Their influence in state politics is undeniable: the Service Employees International Union pumped nearly $4 million into eight independent expenditures alone to get their Democrats of choice elected to the Legislature this year.

Michael Genest, founder of Capitol Matrix Consulting who served as a budget director for former Gov. Arnorld Schwarzenegger, pointed to union power — and pressure — as one reason why Newsom may have moved too soon.

“This is no time to start adding really major costs to the state budget when it’s very possible we could go deeply in the wrong direction,” he said, noting the state’s economic uncertainty. “There’s always a reason to spend money, but some people care more about the reason than they do about what’s in the bank account.”

H.D. Palmer, Newom’s Department of Finance spokesperson, has also acknowledged the state’s financial unknowns but was confident in the governor’s budgeting.

“The governor is required under the state Constitution to present a balanced budget by Jan. 10 of next year, which he will do,” he said. “There are any number of actions that can be done to balance a budget. Obviously the major thing right now is: where are revenues going to go?”

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Mackenzie Mays

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November 4, 2023
Opinion: California didn’t ban Skittles. But it tackled a food safety problem the FDA hasn’t solved

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Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law California’s Food Safety Act banning four ingredients that are linked to health risks. These substances — red dye no. 3, propyl paraben, brominated vegetable oil and potassium bromate, currently found in some candies, sodas and baked goods — will not be allowed in the state’s foods starting in 2027. All four are banned from foods in the European Union (which only allows red no. 3 in candied and cocktail cherries), but, California aside, they remain perfectly legal in the U.S.

New York is considering a similar law that would also ban a fifth substance previously included in California’s law — titanium dioxide, which is used in Skittles. That’s why the California measure got dubbed the “Skittles ban” (a name that stuck even after titanium dioxide was cut from the draft).

California is the first state to go beyond Food and Drug Administration regulations by banning the other four additives. Should it have deferred to the FDA?

The challenges facing the FDA make the case for state action. Sluggish and irregular safety reviews, a fast-track ingredient approval loophole that is abused by manufacturers, and a focus on acute food poisoning over long-term diet all hinder the agency’s ability to address the growing risks associated with our food supply.

The FDA is required to review the safety of any new food additive and grant approval before it can be used. If evidence indicates that an additive is unsafe, the FDA is supposed to decline or limit its use. Three of the substances in California’s law were approved by this standard review: potassium bromate, Red Dye No. 3 and brominated vegetable oil. But the FDA is reevaluating the safety of the latter two and has proposed, though not finalized, a rule to ban brominated vegetable oil from the food supply.

The fourth substance set to be banned in California, propyl paraben, was approved through what’s effectively a loophole in the FDA system. Ingredients classified as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) are exempt from the additive category and thus from careful FDA review. Congress crafted this exemption to be used infrequently, primarily to keep common ingredients like salt and spices on the market without an onerous approval process. But as food companies sought to avoid the rigorous food additive review, GRAS applications piled up.

Without the resources to research the applications, and lacking further support from Congress, the FDA allowed manufacturers to skip the application and determine GRAS status with only a “voluntary notification process.” This means companies can choose whether to let the FDA know they believe their substance is GRAS — in which case FDA can affirm that decision — or they can self-affirm GRAS status and market the substance without ever notifying the FDA. Thousands of substances have entered the food supply this way. Even when companies voluntarily notify, as was the case for propyl paraben in 1984, the FDA does not conduct a full safety review to affirm GRAS status.

Since GRAS notification is voluntary, the FDA does not know all the substances in our food supply. One study found that of the 4,284 GRAS determinations made as of January 2011, just 582 were cleared through the FDA’s voluntary notification process.

Although the FDA has the authority to revoke GRAS status or an additive approval, the agency reviews the safety of greenlighted ingredients sporadically, rather than regularly — and often slowly.

Take for example, trans fat from partially hydrogenated oils, a GRAS substance used for decades in commercial baked goods and other products. A 2004 citizen petition asked the FDA to look into the safety of these oils, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the FDA determined that they were not GRAS and banned them in food starting in 2020. By the time the FDA got around to this, New York City had already banned them in restaurants (in 2006), as had California (in 2008).

The under-regulation of food additives is part of a larger challenge. FDA vetting focuses more on acute risks, such as food-borne illness, than on longer-term risks from diet. Of the agency’s more than $1 billion budget for its foods program, only 7% goes to nutrition and labeling, its major strategies to address diet-related disease. Yet while foodborne illness causes about 3,000 deaths per year, 1.5 million deaths in 2018 — more than half of all deaths that year — resulted from conditions linked to diet.

But states moving to ban substances isn’t a perfect solution either. They generally don’t have the resources to conduct comprehensive safety reviews, and it would be more efficient to beef up the FDA’s infrastructure than to duplicate costly systems across states and potentially create a confusing patchwork of bans.

We desperately need change at the federal level. The Government Accountability Office reported on flaws in the GRAS system in 2010, and the FDA has not addressed the majority of the recommendations, such as regularly reviewing the safety of GRAS substances and requiring companies to provide basic information about these substances. The FDA urgently needs additional Congressional funding to take action on food safety for all ingredients, with a particular eye toward diet-related chronic disease.

In the meantime, states like California will have to keep taking the lead on evaluating harmful ingredients and show the federal government how it can be done.

Emily Broad Leib is a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the school’s Food Law and Policy Clinic.

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Emily Broad Leib

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November 1, 2023
Cruise sidelines entire U.S. robotaxi fleet to focus on rebuilding ‘public trust’

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In the wake of California withdrawing Cruise’s permit to operate self-driving cars in the state, the company announced that it’s suspending all U.S. robotaxi operations.

The move comes after the California Department of Motor Vehicles alleged that Cruise withheld from regulators video footage of a Cruise robotaxi dragging a person down a city street.

The future for the company is uncertain. Its parent company, General Motors, has lost $1.9 billion on Cruise so far this year, including a $732-million loss in the third quarter, according to its latest earnings report. Competitor Ford shut down its Argo robotaxi unit in 2022, concluding that the possibility of far-off profits weren’t worth the enormous cash drain.

The California DMV gave two reasons for suspending Cruise’s license this week: concerns about safety and claims that the company withheld from regulators video footage that showed a Cruise robotaxi drag an already injured woman 20 feet across street pavement before emergency workers could reach her.

“The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust,” Cruise said in a statement online Thursday night. “Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise.”

Cruise vehicles with humans behind the wheel will continue to operate. Until this week, the company had been operating driverless services in San Francisco, Phoenix, Miami, Houston and Austin, Texas.

Cruise needs to be “extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety” as it rebuilds public trust, a spokeswoman told The Times.

(1/3) The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust. Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.

— cruise (@Cruise) October 27, 2023

The incident marks a dark chapter in the emerging history of the automated vehicle industry. Whether Cruise’s actions will harm the industry’s reputation, or only its own, remains to be seen.

Robotaxi companies claim that autonomous vehicles are already safer than cars driven by humans. Officials in San Francisco say they’re having trouble getting these companies to provide adequate data to prove that. But Cruise is dealing with more than safety in this case — it’s dealing with allegations that it misled regulators and the media in ways that might erode public trust.

On Oct. 2, a car with a human behind the wheel hit a woman who was crossing at the intersection of 5th and Market streets in San Francisco against a red light. The pedestrian slid over the hood and into the path of a Cruise robotaxi, with no human driver. She became pinned under the car, and was later taken to a hospital.

Cruise quickly called the crash tragic but said that the robotaxi stopped as it was supposed to and that a human driver couldn’t have reacted as quickly.

What Cruise did not say, and what the DMV revealed Tuesday, is that after sitting still for an unspecified period of time, the robotaxi began moving forward at about 7 mph, dragging the woman with it for 20 feet.

Cruise had shown a video of the incident to reporters but barred them from posting it publicly. (Because of that restriction, The Times turned down Cruise’s offer.) The video shown to reporters ended with the robotaxi sitting motionless, but did not include the vehicle dragging the woman.

The DMV said Cruise showed it the same abbreviated video, and only later did the agency see the full version. The two sides are fighting about that version of events. Cruise told reporters it showed the DMV the full video from the start.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the DMV said it stands by the facts outlined in the orders of suspension.

Cruise Chief Executive Kyle Vogt

(Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Controversy has surrounded the company for months, after San Francisco’s fire chief lit into Cruise and another robotaxi company, Waymo, for interfering with firetrucks and emergency workers. Police said robotaxis were getting in their way too.

Dozens of such incidents have been reported, including robotaxis blocking an ambulance from exiting a firehouse, driving onto fire hoses and parking themselves there, bursting through police tape and getting tangled in downed utility wires. Cruise robotaxis sometimes gather together up to a dozen at a time to block pedestrians and other cars at busy intersections, a phenomenon whose cause remains a mystery, at least to the public.

Nonetheless, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxi fares, voted to allow a massive expansion of robotaxi service across San Francisco. Cruise Chief Executive Kyle Vogt soon started talking about big plans for explosive growth, including the introduction next year of a six-passenger pod-like vehicle with no steering wheel called the Origin. “The goal is to get to scale as quickly as we can in terms of the total number of AVs to make this business profitable and sustainable,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September.

Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, is also planning to grow its fleets and move into new cities. It has already launched in Santa Monica and will soon expand to Los Angeles. Los Angeles officials are trying to get a close look at company plans, but are stymied by state law that gives cities little authority over robotaxi operations.

Other robotaxi companies are also gearing up to expand, including Zoox and Motional. Those companies are likely to draw more scrutiny in the wake of Cruise’s setback, said Bryant Walker Smith, an automated vehicle law expert at the University of South Carolina.

Alain Kornhauser, who heads the autonomous vehicle engineering program at Princeton, said the dragging incident is indeed tragic but it’s something that can be fixed. “The problem is, I don’t think anybody who’s writing code thought about a person being trapped under the car,” he said. “Now they can do something like mount a camera to make sure there’s no one under the car before it moves.”

People will be forgiving of odd robotaxi behavior if they trust the companies involved, he said. “But this covering-up business and not being forthright” does long-term damage to public acceptance, he said. “Didn’t we learn from Watergate that the coverup can be worse than the crime? They could be apologetic. They could say, ‘We’re not going to do that again.’”

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Russ Mitchell

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October 27, 2023
California congressman offers bill to allow striking workers to collect unemployment pay

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The political fight over whether workers on strike should be allowed to collect unemployment benefits is reigniting in Washington.

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who is running for Senate, is planning to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would provide unemployment benefits nationwide to workers on strike. Most states don’t allow striking workers to collect unemployment with the exception of New York and New Jersey. Eligibility requirements and the amount of weekly unemployment pay also varies by state.

Under the Empowering Striking Workers Act of 2023, workers would be able to collect unemployment pay after two weeks on strike, according to a draft of the bill viewed by The Times. Workers would also be eligible for unemployment benefits starting on the date a lockout begins, when the employer hired permanent replacement workers or if the worker becomes unemployed after a strike or lock-out ends, whichever is earlier.

Democratic U.S. Reps. Donald Norcross of New Jersey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York also are sponsoring the bill. Labor unions SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild of America, the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO are supporting the legislation as well, according to Schiff’s office.

But with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, the odds that the bill will pass are slim. Businesses have strongly opposed the idea because they said it would lead to higher employer taxes. Employers pay state and federal payroll taxes to fund the unemployment insurance program.

The expected introduction of a federal bill comes after California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed state legislation in September to provide unemployment for striking workers. Newsom said he did so because of financial concerns, a move highly criticized by labor leaders.

California borrowed billions of dollars from the federal government to cover unemployment benefits, and the state’s unemployment fund debt was projected to be nearly $20 billion by the end of the year. California’s unemployment pay is $450 a week for a maximum of 26 weeks. Business fought the bill because they said they would pay additional taxes annually to repay California’s loan from the federal government.

The WGA and SAG-AFTRA lobbied for the expanded benefits, saying that they would help workers pay their bills. While members rely on side jobs and strike funds to stay afloat, that income dwindles the longer a strike goes on. The 148-day Hollywood writers strike ended after WGA members ratified a new contract. Actors and crew members represented by SAG-AFTRA have been on strike for more than 100 days.

Democrats have expressed support for labor unions ahead of the 2024 elections. Labor unions including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Communication Workers of America and the Amalgamated Transit Union have endorsed Schiff for Senate, while other unions have endorsed his main Democratic rivals in the race.

During an October debate in Los Angeles, Schiff, along with California Democratic Senate candidates Barbara Lee and Katie Porter, disagreed with Newsom’s decision to veto the bill to provide striking workers unemployment benefits. He mentioned during that event he was working on federal legislation.

“When they go and strike for better work and better wages for themselves and others, they need to have unemployment compensation, because they’re striking for all workers,” Schiff said at the debate.

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Queenie Wong

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October 24, 2023
Mission Inn Museum could lose its home at Riverside’s ritzy Mission Inn Hotel & Spa

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The Mission Inn Museum could lose its home at its namesake’s historic confines in Riverside if the hotel and the foundation that runs the museum cannot agree on lease terms.

Since 2000, the museum, run by the Mission Inn Foundation, has been housed within the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa, which was built in 1902 and over the years has hosted several U.S. presidents and celebrities including Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Clark Gable and Harry Houdini.

The hotel, run by the Historic Mission Inn Corporation, has been named a National Historic Landmark.

“The Mission Inn Foundation and Museum is being threatened with eviction from the Mission Inn hotel, our home of over 30 years,” the foundation said in a news release.

The museum hosts historical artifacts relating to the mission and offers guided tours of the grounds to guests as well as students.

“If the Mission Inn Foundation is evicted, this may all end,” the foundation said.

Last week, the foundation launched a GoFundMe campaign for a legal fund that, as of Friday, has gathered $1,110 toward its $10,000 goal.

A Change.org petition in support of the museum had gathered 850 signatures as of Friday.

The foundation claims that when the site was sold by the city to private buyers, “the Mission Inn Foundation was specifically written into the sales agreement to ensure that the community would retain access to its most treasured landmark.”

The foundation was to “retain museum space within the hotel, retain the right to give tours and to conduct other museum services for 50 years.”

The situation, however, is more complicated due to a move made by the state in 2013.

The museum has occupied its space under a 22-year lease agreement made in 2000 between Riverside’s now-dissolved redevelopment agency and the Mission Inn Corporation, according to a statement from the city. The lease agreement included two renewal options, each for 10 years.

The redevelopment agency then subleased the space to the museum at no charge.

But in 2013 the local redevelopment agency and hundreds of others across the state were thrown out of business by the California Legislature. Authorized by law since 1945, redevelopment agencies used a portion of property tax money to partner with developers to encourage development in blighted areas.

The state Legislature voted in 2011 to abolish the agencies in order to bolster state tax revenues for schools and public safety agencies. The action was later upheld by the California Supreme Court.

Cities were allowed to form “successor agencies” to complete business started by the defunct redevelopment agencies but could not enter into any new business.

As a result, in 2022, when the successor agency in Riverside attempted to exercise its option to renew its lease with the Mission Inn hotel, state regulators denied its bid.

“The request to renew the lease was denied, with the (State) Department of Finance stating, ‘Pursuant to HSC section 34163(c)(1), successor agencies shall not renew or extend the term of leases,’” the city said in its statement.

The city said it has attempted to work with the hotel and the foundation for two years to either relocate the museum and “generally facilitate a good outcome.” But now the outlook for the museum looks uncertain.

“To date … these efforts between the Mission Inn and the Mission Inn Foundation have not borne fruit,” the city said.

On Sept. 29, the Mission Inn Foundation was served with a notice to vacate the premises.

The Historic Mission Inn Corporation has made “numerous” new lease offers, which the foundation has rejected, Patrick O’Brien, an attorney for the corporation, told the Press-Enterprise.

The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa did not immediately return a request for comment.

Karl Hicks, board president of the Mission Inn Foundation, told the Press-Enterprise that the offer was a single, five-year lease with no renewal options and “nothing after that.”

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Christian Martinez

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October 22, 2023
A warm, wet El Niño winter is in store for California and much of the U.S.

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After a blistering summer of record heat, raging wildfires and unpredictable storms, federal scientists on Thursday said a warm, wet winter driven by El Niño is in store for California and much of the rest of country.

The first winter outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that a strong El Niño will remain in place through at least the spring, with further strengthening possible over the next couple of months.

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-La Niña Southern Oscillation pattern — sometimes referred to as ENSO — and is a major driver of temperature and precipitation patterns across the globe.

“The anticipated strong El Niño is the predominant climate factor driving the U.S. winter outlook this year,” said Jon Gottschalck, chief of the operational prediction branch at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science.

Temperature forecasts for December, January and February favor warmer-than-average conditions across the northern tier of the U.S. and much of the West, with the highest chance of above-normal temperatures expected in Northern California, the Pacific Northwest and northern New England. Odds are tilted toward warmth in Central and Southern California as well.

The forecast also favors wetter-than-average conditions in many regions of the country, including nearly all of California, the southern Plains, Texas and the Southeast. Widespread drought will persist across much of the central and southern U.S., but not in California, where the Central Valley and San Francisco Bay area have the highest odds in the state of above-normal rainfall.

Warmer-than-average temperatures are favored across the northern tier of the U.S. and West Coast, according to a new winter outlook from NOAA.

(NOAA)

The outlook conjures the specter of another soggy season for the Golden State, which was pummeled by 31 atmospheric river storms, deadly floods and record-setting snow last winter.

Gottschalck said the combination of wetness and warmth means more precipitation is likely to fall as rain instead of snow. But he and other experts also said it’s too soon to say whether California will see a repeat of the atmospheric rivers it experienced at the start of this year.

Wetter-than-average conditions are likely across much of California, as well as the central Rockies, the southern Plains, Gulf Coast, Southeast and lower-mid-Atlantic and northern Alaska, according to a new winter outlook from NOAA.

“It’s important to stress that even though we see these general patterns during El Niño and La Niña years, there is still a lot of variability and not every event is going to follow the general pattern,” Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a recent El Niño update.

Kalansky noted that last year’s La Niña was a perfect example, as the state received a deluge of moisture despite the pattern’s association with drier conditions in Southern California.

“So, the declaration of an El Niño doesn’t guarantee that Southern California is going to have a wet, stormy winter, but it does stack the deck in that direction,” she said.

The wet outlook follows the planet’s hottest summer ever recorded.

Global average surface temperatures in June, July, August and September were the highest they’ve ever been, marked by sizzling heat waves in Europe, China and the southwestern U.S. — including a record 31 consecutive days of high temperatures at or above 110 degrees in Phoenix.

September was so hot — 2.59 degrees above the 20th century average of 59 degrees — that it also broke the record for the highest monthly global temperature anomaly, or the largest difference from the long-term average, NOAA officials said.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth, called the month’s temperature data “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

Timothy Koelkebeck hikes an Eaton Canyon trail as temperatures reach 100 degrees and above.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The September data and winter forecast make it 99% certain that 2023 will end up as the planet’s hottest year on record, according to Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Currently, 2016 and 2020 are tied for that record.

Schmidt said this year’s monthly heat records are particularly remarkable because they are occurring before the peak of the current El Niño event. Other hot periods, including in 2016 and 2020, happened after the peak of El Niño.

That doesn’t bode well for what might be in store next spring, he said.

“I would anticipate that 2024 is still going to be warmer than 2023, even given the ‘gobsmackingly bananas’ anomalies that we’ve had this summer,” Schmidt said. “What we would predict for next year, based just effectively on the long-term trend and the predicted level of ENSO going into next year, is that it will be warmer again — and by quite a lot.”

Schmidt said he was surprised by the unusually high temperatures this summer. Persistent climate warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels is to be expected, as are warmer global temperatures linked to El Niño, but scientists are still seeking answers about why 2023 has been so off-the-charts.

Some theories include a recent change to shipping regulations concerning aerosols, which reduced the upper limit of sulfur in fuels. The change was geared toward cleaner air in ports and coastal areas but may have had an unintended planetary warming effect because the aerosols were reflecting sunlight away from Earth.

A dearth of Saharan dust, possibly linked to weakened trade winds from El Niño, could also be a warming factor since the dust normally has a cooling effect on the North Atlantic, Schdmit and other researchers said.

Residents check out the damage after the fast-moving and swollen Tule River crumbled parts of Globe Drive in Springville, Calif., in March.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Additionally, the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in 2022 shot record-breaking amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere, which can act as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

“But all of the quantitative estimates of how big those effects are are way too small to explain what’s going on,” Schmidt said. “This is not a neat story. It could be the long-term trends, plus ENSO, plus a little bit from the volcano, plus a little bit from the marine shipping emission changes, plus quite a large chunk of internal variability.”

Indeed, he said that while the long-term trends point to continued warming, there are likely to be years in the future that are cooler than 2023.

What is indisputable, though, is that people are already experiencing the effects of warmer temperatures — including extreme rainfall, extended droughts, heat waves and sea level rise — through their impacts on infrastructure, coral reefs, fishing, crop yields and other sectors, Schmidt said.

NOAA experts said this year’s El Niño probably won’t be as severe as the one in 2015-16, which ranked as a “very strong El Niño,” but that it would still be wise for the West Coast to ready itself for more El Niño-fueled moisture. This month, state officials said they are taking steps to prepare for such a possibility, including assembling flood control material and sandbags, and providing funds for critical levee repairs.

Though the winter storms significantly eased drought conditions in California, the soggy winter was among dozens of billion-dollar climate disasters in the U.S. this year, with flooding in the state between January and March causing about $4.2 billion in damage, according to NOAA. In August, Tropical Storm Hilary dropped more than a year’s worth of rain in a single day in several regions of the state.

Other billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. include major flooding in New York, Hurricane Idalia in Florida and a devastating firestorm in Hawaii.

“So far this year we’ve had 24 confirmed billion-dollar disasters, which is already a record-breaking amount,” said Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist with NOAA. “And we still have October, November and December to go.”

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Hayley Smith

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October 19, 2023
Virginia Could Decide the Future of the GOP’s Abortion Policy

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A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.

An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.

After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.

Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem

With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.

If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.

“Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.

But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”

These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.

Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”

The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.

The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.

These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.

Such places have continued to break sharply toward Democrats in other elections this year that revolved around abortion, particularly the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election won by the liberal candidate in a landslide this spring, and an Ohio ballot initiative carried comfortably by abortion-rights forces in August. In special state legislative elections around the country this year, Democrats have also consistently run ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the same districts.

“There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.

Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”

Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.

In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.

“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”

In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master. And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”

The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.

Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters. “That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”

Jerusalem Demsas: The abortion policy most Americans want

Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.

Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.

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Ronald Brownstein

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October 8, 2023
Could Virginia Become the Next Florida? It May Come Down to 20 Legislative Races

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It is exceedingly rare—as in, it basically never happens—that a first-time candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates becomes internationally famous. Yet last week, Susanna Gibson—nurse practitioner, mother of two, and Democrat from suburban Richmond—made headlines around the world after The Washington Post revealed that Gibson and her husband had performed sex acts for a live online audience. In at least two of the videos, the Post reported, Gibson told viewers she was “raising money for a good cause.”

Whether that “cause” was her campaign is unclear. In Gibson’s only public statement since the news broke, she quickly and deftly spun the controversy, claiming that she was the victim of a political dirty trick and of revenge porn. Her Republican opponent, a housing developer named David Owen, said his campaign had nothing to do with the videos surfacing. “I’m sure this is a difficult time for Susanna and her family,” Owen said, “and I’m remaining focused on my campaign.”

However the legalities of Gibson’s exposure may play out—her attorney has suggested that circulating the videos breaks the state’s revenge porn law—the episode is adding complexity to what was already a close and crucial race in an off-year election cycle with enormous stakes. All 140 of Virginia’s legislative seats are on the ballot; adding to the uncertainty is the fact that this will be the first election held with newly redistricted lines. “Without hyperbole, these are the most important, most unpredictable legislative races we’ve ever seen in Virginia, at a very strange time on the national calendar,” says David Mills, a former executive director of the Virginia Democratic Party. “Until we see the results in November, no one knows quite what to make of it.”

In-person early voting begins Friday. Roughly 20 contests are likely to determine whether Republicans gain control of both houses of Virginia’s legislature—and give Republican governor Glenn Youngkin the power to steer the state even further to the right on everything from abortion to school curriculum. “State Republicans were essentially one vote away from passing the abortion ban earlier this year,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who grew up in Virginia and has worked campaigns in the state. “Which makes it happening with a Republican majority more than a theoretical threat.”

Youngkin also has plenty at stake personally: Victory in the state this November would set him up nicely to become a Republican presidential contender in 2028. The governor’s PAC has been setting records, taking in $8.5 million this year, with much of the case being funneled toward legislative races.

Given those dynamics, it’s surprising that it took until late August for the Democratic National Committee to focus significant resources on Virginia, recently pumping in $1.2 million—only after the state’s two Democratic US senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, began sounding the alarm. “I started noticing a real waking up among national Democrats about a month ago,” a top Virginia Democratic insider says. “The DNC has stepped up. The president, behind the scenes, has really gone above and beyond to help raise money and attention.”

While Gibson’s race is significant, several other tight contests figure to be more significant in deciding the narrow math of Virginia legislative majorities. On the House of Delegates side—where Republicans currently hold a four-seat edge, and where a candidate could win with as few as 8,000 votes—the bellwether looks to be a Virginia Beach district where a staunchly antiabortion Republican incumbent, Karen Greenhalgh, is being challenged by Michael Feggans, a Black Air Force veteran turned cyber security consultant and rookie Democratic candidate.

On the senate side—where Democrats now have a four-seat advantage—two matchups should be pivotal. In Loudoun County, a Washington suburb, Democrat Russet Perry, a lawyer and former CIA staffer, is taking on Juan Pablo Segura, the 35-year-old founder of a donut franchise and medical software business and the son of a billionaire. Further south, outside of Richmond in Henrico County, Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg is going up against incumbent Republican Siobhan Dunnavant. “That is probably going to be, if it isn’t already, the most expensive, line-in-the-sand race that Governor Youngkin has,” the top Democratic insider says. “Democratic operatives feel like control of the senate hinges on that race. It’s been a blue area lately, but with a little different turnout it looks a lot redder.”

National issues have been prominent in the local races, with Democrats emphasizing the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and Republicans highlighting “parental rights.” One major wild card is the possible shutdown of the federal government, which would hit harder in Virginia, where approximately 172,000 residents are federal employees and 130,000 military members are stationed in the state.

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Chris Smith

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September 22, 2023