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September 30, 2024 - 1:00pm
If states are the laboratories of American democracy, then the state of California is the preferred lab setting for progressives to test out their most extreme policy ideas. Everything from drug decriminalisation to radical educational curricula has been tried and tested in the Golden State. But the receptive political environment under the state’s one-party Democratic establishment and its sympathetic governor Gavin Newsom is wavering.
In recent weeks, Newsom has voted down a series of bills designed to benefit undocumented migrants in a move that is revealing the fault lines in progressive politics. Democrats are now on the defensive after nearly four years in which a worsening border crisis have swelled the ranks of the country’s undocumented population; and the issue has accordingly become a political millstone for Democrats everywhere, from their presidential candidate on down.
Newsom (who has harboured presidential ambitions of his own) has clearly turned on his state party’s most extreme immigration positions. In the last month, the Governor vetoed three major bills passed by Democrats in the state assembly attempting to regularise the status of undocumented immigrants; these changes would have made it easier for them to either engage in economic activity or use public services heretofore reserved for citizens and legal residents.
Earlier in September, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have granted some undocumented immigrants up to $150,000 in loans to buy a home under loan programmes managed by the California Housing Finance Agency. On Friday, he turned down another bill that would have given undocumented immigrants legal employment in California’s public universities: it was based on an untested legal theory propounded by progressive academics arguing that states have a right to ignore federal law disallowing the practice.
Over the weekend, Newsom axed a third bill, which aimed to give undocumented people access to unemployment benefits and could have been the most politically incendiary of all (he vetoed a similar proposal once before). The Governor’s refusal now to play along with such proposals indicates perhaps that the trend toward immigration maximalism has finally reached its practical limit in this most liberal of states.
Both Newsom and his fellow California Democrat Kamala Harris have attempted to execute Rightward pivots on immigration to fend off Donald Trump’s attacks. However, the broader support of many Democrat activists and the practical insistence of Left-leaning intellectuals on a borderless society has all but made it impossible for the party to change its course in both policy and political terms.
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SubscribeDemocrats do this right before every election. You can mark it on your calendar.
Democrats are, at long last, being forced to live under the policies they support. The people in power were able to avoid that for decades by being wealthy enough or separated from reality enough to avoid living what they foisted on residents. This transparent “pivot” should be a clear sign to anyone not beholden to political tribalism that the left’s approach has failed. But the politician’s DNA cannot admit to failure.
Kamala was/is the border czar. That alone should be a disqualifying event in hearing her say anything about the issue that she allowed to fester. And I do mean “allowed.” The border has been open for the duration of this administration and everyone knows it. The foreseeable consequences are playing out in one city after another, many of those former sanctuary cities that have too late learned the folly of that attitude.
About three years ago, I reviewed a Daily Caller documentary called “Cartelville USA” about how, in some rural communities in Southern California, drug cartels are becoming the de facto government, growing marijuana in hoop houses with stolen water and slave labor and punishing people who get in the way (some of the interviewees had their faces blurred out for fear of retaliation.)
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/documentary-review-cartelville-usa
Well, I am glad to find out that some of California’s leadership is finally waking up to the problem and realizing that laws need to be enforced, and that if you create a power vacuum like this, someone else will step into it. Still, I’m pessimistic about whether Newsom’s pragmatism will ever find a big enough base in the Democratic Party to change how most Democratic politicians actually behave.