Amid some of the most restrictive lockdowns in the entire nation, California is suffering an explosion of coronavirus cases. Los Angeles County records a new coronavirus death every eight minutes, but a new case every six seconds, a mathematical combination that means the worst is yet to come.
And it’s not just that the pandemic is worsening in spite of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s economically ruinous regulations. The surge might actually be happening because of them.
With this backdrop, and not long after Newsom was found to be partying in violation of his own lockdown edicts, a petition to recall Newsom from office has aggregated more than 1 million signatures. If the petitioners can obtain another 500,000 valid signatures by March, they will be able to force a special recall election, exactly like the one that ousted Gov. Gray Davis in November 2003.
Voters should seize this moment. Newsom is a trust-fund politician, corrupt and entitled to his bones, but in the governor’s mansion, he has also exposed himself as an enemy of the state, enjoying $200 plates with 22 friends indoors at the Michelin-starred The French Laundry while California was literally burning.
In one of the only states in the nation where good weather makes outdoor dining — and for that matter, outdoor schooling — possibly nearly every day of the year, Newsom has banned outdoor dining, devastating the restaurant and bar industries. The entire state is stuck under a stay-at-home order as millions of children are approaching a full year of having not attended school In person.
The result: people fatigued with lockdowns are socializing in packed homes rather than meeting in the relative safety of restaurant patios. It should be added that this problem is worsened significantly by the artificial statewide housing supply crisis that Newsom has failed to solve.
Meanwhile, the state unemployment rate was last recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in November as 8.2%, making the national unemployment rate of 6.7% seem mild. This is just one more added inducement for residents to flee California for states with better opportunity and even lower coronavirus death rates per capita — North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah have unemployment rates of 6.2%, 4.8%, and 4.3%, respectively.
Even before the pandemic, Newsom’s tenure was a slowly unfolding disaster. Under his tenure, California has maintained the worst power grid in the nation, such that Newsom had to subject the state to rolling blackouts last summer. This owes to green politics and a misguided effort to eliminate all carbon-based energy on an overly aggressive timetable. This effort is failing, and the situation will get worse, especially because, as lieutenant governor, Newsom oversaw the final shuttering of California’s nuclear power, a clean and genuinely reliable source of electricity.
Newsom also signed into law Assembly Bill 5 to force companies ranging from Uber and DoorDash to newspapers and entertainment venues to treat their independent contractors as formal employees, who must have employer Social Security taxes and benefits paid. Contractors relying on their status across the state begged for carve-outs because this measure simply would have killed their jobs without creating any new ones. Freelance journalists were among those hardest hit, as firms discontinued their use of California-based contractors in order to comply with the law.
In the end, the voters had to undo Newsom’s work through a ballot proposition repealing AB 5 to avoid an employment implosion and the immediate statewide deactivation of Uber and Lyft. Californians voted in favor of a proposition that largely revoked the bill’s stranglehold over the gig economy, saving the incomes of the hundreds of thousands of residents who drive for Uber and Lyft.
California’s health insurance program for the indigent, Medi-Cal, covers illegal immigrant minors. But Newsom expanded coverage to include illegal aliens up through age 25, at the cost of nearly $100 million. This comes as state and local government budgets are shrinking because the tax base is fleeing California. For two years running, this naturally beautiful state has lost net residents to migration, as productive, tax-paying citizens flee to seek economic opportunity not only in fast-growing Texas but also in such unpretentious places as Tennessee, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, and Utah. So bad is the population drain that California is actually expected to lose a congressional seat in the coming reapportionment for the first time in its 170-year history.
Finally, Newsom is a personally odious creep. As the 39-year-old Mayor of San Francisco, he dated a teenager. After sleeping with the wife of his (former) best friend, he took $10,000 from a public fund intended for city employees with life-threatening illnesses to pay her off. He has now at least settled down, marrying Jennifer Siebel Newsom, but his wife has cozied up to rabid anti-vaccine activists and insists on being called “First Partner.”
Throw in a growing homeless crisis that city and state officials cannot get a handle on, and it is not hard to see why the signature-gathering began or why it continues. Those Californians not already voting with their feet should take advantage of this opportunity to remove and replace him while they still have a state to save.
