Global Courant
Speaking at a New York climate summit in September, Governor Gavin Newsom said he had to “block” his own Democratic legislature from passing a series of climate laws in the final days before lawmakers adjourned last year.
The comment frustrated his legislative allies in California and prompted Newsom to embark on an apology tour to smooth things over.
Since then, he has tried to ram big policy through the state house twice more.
Each governor uses different strategies as he steps into the executive branch beyond his traditional powers and enters the public policy-making arena in Sacramento, where the state legislature is responsible for introducing, discussing, and passing legislation.
Some governors limit their policy agenda, leaving little need to negotiate with lawmakers. Many tie their marquee proposals to the state budget process that begins and ends with the governor. Others use their celebrity, or the statewide vote, to force lawmakers to make deals.
Whether it stemmed from a lack of patience or stubborn willfulness, the policy streak of California’s 40th governor has become increasingly apparent during his second term. Newsom has a penchant for publicly producing a sense of urgency and giving lawmakers as little time as possible to act.
“The process is always difficult and I recognize that I don’t always make it easy,” Newsom said at a news conference in Sacramento this month, as he celebrated the signing of a series of infrastructure bills he submitted to the legislature in the 11th hour of the budget process.
“You weren’t supposed to chuckle,” Newsom told lawmakers standing next to him on stage.
Although he said this in jest, the governor hinted at an uncomfortable reality. Despite gathering for a photo opportunity that day, the tactic does not endear Newsom to interest groups or his Democratic colleagues in the state House.
“Gavin Newsom has rightly decided that he is willing to annoy his allies because they need him more than he needs them,” said Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego political science professor who wrote a book on how governors manage to pass bills and budget proposals. “He takes advantage of the publicity that every statement he makes creates a kind of political ultimatum when he wants the legislature to do something.”
So far it has produced mixed results.
While Newsom’s tactics have helped him get some wins, it doesn’t always deliver everything he wanted to win. The Democratic governor last fall announced a special session for lawmakers to impose a fine for excessive profits in the oil industry and just weeks after his mea culpa for suggesting Sacramento lawmakers had an obligation to the oil industry.
Sensing the political pressure of rising gasoline prices, Newsom railed against Big Oil for “price erosion” and taking advantage of Californians. Standing in front of television cameras in Sacramento, he said lawmakers should impose a tax on the profits of the oil industry to protect consumers now and get “every dollar, every cent back into the pockets of those who were defrauded.”
But the governor’s plan ran into problems from the start.
No other state had successfully introduced caps and fines on oil profits. Without a blueprint to follow, lawmakers feared a fine could push the industry to continue raising prices in California. Newsom recognized that navigating unfamiliar terrain was challenging.
The legislature held its first public hearing on the proposal nearly five months after Newsom introduced the idea. By then, the governor’s office had presented only an outline plan to lawmakers with a yet-to-be-determined profit cap, as the government struggled to figure out how to implement his idea.
Gas prices also began to fall, which relieved the governor of urgent action.
Newsom scrapped his original plan in March and instead demanded more transparency from the oil industry, hoping to better understand the cause of price spikes. Instead of lawmakers approving a cap on oil profits, the final law gave the California Energy Commission more power to investigate gasoline prices and the ability to sanction oil companies through a public hearing.
“It’s the only thing you can do,” said Susan Kennedy, a former chief of staff to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Every administration I’ve seen has taken gas prices to the extreme and they’re doing a study and they’re going after the oil companies and they’re researching gas prices. I think I must have supervised five of them. You do that because you have no control over the supply and demand of oil.”
Despite falling short of his very public call for lawmakers to enact a profit cap and fine, Newsom hailed his transparency bill as a major victory over the oil industry.
While Newsom presented his original punishment as necessary to protect consumers, he acknowledged in signing the bill that “nothing is going to happen any time soon” and that “prices aren’t going to drop immediately.” Nor is there any obligation for oil companies to reimburse consumers for summer price spikes.
Kousser said the governor’s declaration of victory in that case reminded him of Schwarzenegger, who served two terms as California governor from 2003 to 2011.
“His problem, especially in his first year and a half, is he would come in with this thing… and the legislature would just completely roll him and then he would say, ‘Fantastic,’” Kousser said of Schwarzenegger. “He would get something done and declare victory. Then he got a reputation for thinking, okay, he just wants to get something so we can do what we want, and help take the credit and be happy and we’ll be all right.
He said that is also a danger to Newsom.
“It gives the feeling that the governor is really not interested in the policy change,” Kousser said. “The governor might be interested in the political victory. Once you have that reputation, it can hurt you.
Newsom again tried to thwart lawmakers in May when he introduced a package of bills to speed up the process of building California’s major infrastructure by limiting the likelihood of long-term legal challenges to projects under the state’s environmental quality law.
Lawmakers and environmentalists criticized the late arrival of the package, the lack of time for sufficient public review of such a sweeping policy, and the inclusion of Newsom’s existing plan to build a tunnel to transport water under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Southern California.
Kathryn Phillips, the former executive director of the Sierra Club California who openly criticized Newsom’s plan during negotiations, said the infrastructure battle speaks to the “contempt he has for the environmental community.”
The governor often points out that his father was an environmental activist as an example of his deep roots in the movement. But Newsom “wants to be praised as a leader of something he didn’t exactly lead,” she said.
“You have to have people following you if you’re a leader,” Phillips said. ‘And if you just do things to people and don’t talk to them, you’re not really leading. You are imposing.’
Phillips also said Newsom’s desire to push policy through is an example of his impatience with the legislative process, and in turn disdain for public transparency and scrutiny of public policy.
The strategy, however, offers a major benefit to Newsom: it limits time for the opposition to grow and for lawmakers to water down the proposal through public hearings or slow down as a negotiating tactic to exploit their own priorities. Legislative leaders similarly introduced and passed controversial bills in the final days of the session.
“The governor is not interested in disrupting the legislature,” said Angie Wei, Newsom’s former secretary for legislative affairs. “He’s interested in solving the big problems California faces. When your policy is complete, it’s time to go. You can’t let the calendar stop you.”
The governor has repeatedly commented on the limited time he has left at the helm of California’s government and his concern that he regrets not doing more when his term expires in 2026.
“I really want to deliver, not just on goals and aspirations, but on projects,” Newsom said when asked about the shoehorn legislation this month. “And so I’m in a different mindset. There is a kind of stubborn pragmatism. You know, let’s get moving.”
Negotiations on the infrastructure package have held up a budget deal between Newsom and lawmakers in Sacramento for weeks.
The governor threatened to veto the state budget from the legislature unless lawmakers approved his infrastructure plan, a move that could have turned the Democratic infighting into a rare public spectacle.
Legislative leaders stood their ground and eventually won protections for underprivileged communities. Newsom won many of the amenities he originally wanted to speed up projects, but dropped the Delta Tunnel from the proposal.
Former Speaker of Parliament Anthony Rendon, who stepped down as leader of the lower house this summer following the budget deal, said lawmakers are responsible for how Newsom enforces policy on them. The legislature created an imbalance of power when they left the state capitol during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and allowed Newsom to run the state government and only implement policy.
“That’s been handed over,” said Rendon (D-Lakewood), who was concerned at the time about ceding power to the governor. “The legislature weakened itself by not showing up and that relationship between the departments has never been the same. We like to piss on the administration and on Gavin, but that was our fault. It has never been fixed.”
