Gavin Newsom’s Flip-Flops Show Democrats’ Radical Nature
The governor of the nation’s largest state recently reminded us there’s an election coming (as if anyone could forget). In a matter of a few hours, Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., vetoed legislation allowing illegal immigrants to receive state-subsidized mortgages, while his outgoing health secretary expressed regret over the Covid lockdowns that kept California public schools closed for months on end.
The U-turns show the radical nature of the modern Democrat Party. Just as Kamala Harris has tried to obscure and walk away from her prior history of trying to ban private health insurance and opposing immigration enforcement, Newsom too feels the need to backpedal from his own record. It should lead voters to ask the obvious question: Why should these two California Democrats get anywhere near national power?
Opposes Some Benefits for Illegals but Supports Others
Newsom’s first volte-face came in the form of a veto on legislation allowing illegal immigrants to obtain home loans from a state housing finance agency. In his veto message to the legislature, Newsom claimed he could not sign the bill because “expanding program eligibility must be carefully considered within the broader context of the annual state budget to ensure we manage our resources effectively.”
That argument makes sense — at least in isolation. California generally does lurch from budget crisis to budget crisis, making fiscal concerns paramount. In this context, subsidizing benefits for individuals illegally present seems not just a low priority but a policy likely to encourage more illegal immigration.
But opposing mortgage subsidies for migrants is inconsistent with the efforts of Newsom and the California Legislature to spend at least $2.4 billion annually subsidizing health insurance for nearly 1 million migrants illegally present. All the arguments made by advocates of the mortgage legislation apply equally to covering health insurance, just as the argument Newsom made against subsidizing mortgages for immigrants applies equally to subsidizing health coverage. So why did Newsom support one form of state subsidies for migrants but not another?
As Politico noted, the reasons for the contradiction become more apparent when politics is considered:
Newsom has repeatedly warned fellow Democrats in Sacramento not to provide cannonfire for Republicans in an election year, issuing pleas for them to tamp down the raging culture wars rather than provoke them with hot-button issues ranging from banning youth tackle football to reparations. On other proposals that were unlikely to become law, he pushed state Democrats to subordinate their virtue signaling so conservative media outlets couldn’t paint the state as wildly out of touch with America.
Therein lies Newsom’s true strategy: not to become moderate but to appear moderate — at least during the autumn of years divisible by four. After all, when a liberal publication like Politico refers to the phrase “wildly out of touch with America” to describe a state, you know California has fallen off the deep end.
Lockdown Architect Tries to Spin Newsom’s Mistakes
The political spin didn’t end with mortgages for migrants. On the same day Newsom issued his veto message regarding the mortgage bill, his health and human services secretary, Mark Ghaly, announced he would leave his post at the end of the month. Ghaly has served as California’s health secretary since Newsom took office in 2019, including the pandemic period when “California put forward some of the strictest COVID measures in the country, keeping students out of school longer than any other state.”
But in an interview, Ghaly called those lockdowns his “biggest regret” for the harm they did to young children: “As we learn of the impact, and frankly, the overall lower impact on death and morbidity [of Covid] in kids, we may have been able to have kids in school differently than we did throughout the pandemic.”
It’s nice for Ghaly to admit — four years after the fact — how wrong he and Newsom were for standing in the schoolhouse door, blocking children from learning. But other governors in other states decided at the time to reopen schools because they saw “the overall lower impact on death and morbidity” for children four years ago.
The fact that Ghaly would not admit that fact — trying to claim there wasn’t proper data for a risk-benefit analysis when other states had all the data they needed to make the right decision at the time — reveals his comments as little more than a cover-your-tail exercise designed to obscure accountability for the decisions he and Newsom made. It’s of the same mentality that led Newsom to veto the mortgage legislation, to try to make himself and his California colleagues appear less extreme than they are.
But to borrow the old southern phrase, “That dog won’t hunt.” Parents still trying to undo the devastation that Covid lockdowns inflicted on learning outcomes won’t soon forget the effects Democrats like Newsom and Ghaly had on their children’s futures. Likewise, American voters cannot unsee the effects of the open borders policies of the last four years on our national security, not to mention our finances.
And therein lies the real problem for Newsom and his California frenemy Kamala Harris: At some point, the voters get to decide. Newsom can spin all he wants, but accountability arrives on Nov. 5.
This post was originally published at The Federalist.