The Vote Suppressor In Chief
By Kevin Kiley
Republican Assemblyman, 6th District
Major League Baseball has pulled its All-Star game from Georgia over a new state election law, and Gavin Newsom is offering to host it in California – presumably in an empty ballpark. If the MLB is truly concerned with “voter suppression,” it would emphatically reject Newsom’s invitation.
Let’s start with a statement by Newsom last October: “Nothing reeks of desperation quite like the Republican Party organization these days – willing to lie, cheat, and threaten our democracy all for the sake of gaining power.”
What was this nefarious “threat to democracy” he was referring to? Ballot collection boxes.
The California Republican Party had made the boxes available to voters, so Newsom teamed up with Attorney General Xavier Becerra to remove them. A Sacramento court stopped this attempt at voter suppression in what the LA Times called “a significant victory for GOP officials who have insisted their ballot collection campaign is following state election law.”
Newsom also tried last year to suppress all votes for the sitting President of the United States, signing a bill to remove his name from the ballot for not releasing tax returns. The California Supreme Court quickly and unanimously struck the law down. The Chief Justice admonished “it is the voters who must decide” what information “will have consequences at the ballot box.”
Then on Election Day, many voters went to their usual polling place only to find it wasn’t there. Newsom had signed an Executive Order shutting down up to 90 percent of voting locations.
After the election, many people thought they’d get to vote for Kamala Harris’s replacement in the Senate. Newsom had other ideas, unlawfully appointing his crony Alex Padilla.
While Newsom has used COVID-19 to all but abolish the democratic process, his habit of disenfranchising voters did not begin with the virus. After pledging to “respect the will of the electorate” on a recently passed Proposition to keep the death penalty, he did the opposite right after taking office, discarding the votes of 6.6 million Californians.
Suppression has also been Newsom’s chosen weapon against the Recall. His allies candidly admitted their strategy was “all about reducing signatures” and referred to signature sheets as “poisonous petitions.” His spokesman falsely claimed the Recall was a “refusal to play by the rules.” His top surrogates held an event branding it “the California Coup,” which the LA Times said “undermined the state’s legitimate direct democracy system.”
Most jarringly, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine, herself a top party strategist, recently revealed a plan to suppress the entire election. If Newsom is polling poorly in the Fall, she told Politico, “it may be that no Democrat could win. Then, he should step down as governor and [Lieutenant Governor] Eleni Kounalakis should be the governor, and they should cancel the election. In that case, the Democratic Party would retain the governorship.”
See my full post for more examples of Newsom shutting out the public. The point, of course, is to give the well-connected a monopoly on political power. Newsom himself became a county supervisor through the patronage of the Gettys, became Mayor of San Francisco through the patronage of PG&E, and became Governor of California through the patronage of massive unions.
But there is something powerful happening in our state. 2.1 million signatures don't appear out of thin air. This is a movement to restore government by the people, and even Newsom’s unrivaled corruption may not be able to suppress it.