Rep. Kevin Kiley is a freshman member of Congress elected in 2022 to represent California’s 3rd District. The 38-year-old Republican launched his career in politics in 2016 as a California state assemblyman, and in the following years, he emerged as a prominent critic of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Kiley sat down with the Washington Examiner to discuss the state of Republican politics in the Golden State and his experiences so far in Congress.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
FOUR WAYS GAVIN NEWSOM PLANS TO SPEND BILLIONS ON LIBERAL POLICIES IN CALIFORNIA
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: As outsiders, we think of California as this deep-blue state. But when I talk to people who are involved in California politics, they often say that it’s really not as blue as you might think. How would you peg the politics of California at large? And if it isn’t as blue as people think, why is the GOP struggling so much at the state level there? You have a supermajority of Democrats in both chambers of the state legislature, after all.
Rep. Kevin Kiley: Well, I think you have a political class in California whose power is very entrenched, and they’ve used that hold on power to entrench their power even more. You have a whole power structure that’s built around it, you have a whole constellation of interest groups that support it. So, the barriers to change are very high.
Now, that said, we have in the House of Representatives actually picked up seats in recent cycles. We’ve gone from seven Republican members of the House from California to 12.
And notwithstanding what’s happened in the state legislature and in statewide offices, we’ve seen some compelling examples of citizen-led political change at more local levels. Even San Francisco, for example, had two recent recall elections that were successful.
In one case, they overwhelmingly recalled three members of their school board by over 70% of the vote in each case. And they recalled their progressive prosecutor, their district attorney, by an overwhelming margin as well.
Take the results of some of the recent ballot propositions. You had in 2020, for example, I believe it was four separate ballot propositions that, in one form or another, reversed something that the [Democratic-controlled] legislature had done.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: You have really emerged as a very prominent critic of Gov. Gavin Newsom. Where do you see him going? Because lots of people look at him as a potential presidential contender, maybe in 2024. But if not, then in 2028. And from outsiders, it seems like he’s making moves to emerge onto the national stage. What should people know about him?
Kiley: Well, there’s no doubt that Newsom has national aspirations. That’s been no secret since the moment he came into the governor’s office. Even before that, he really hasn’t shown much interest in actually governing the state. This has been a complaint of even Democrat legislators from his very first year in office, that he was so fixated on building a national profile that he simply allowed the state to continue to decline.
In Newsom, you have sort of the perfect personification of everything that is wrong with California politics. During his few short years as governor — he’s been in office, well, a little over four years now — all of the things that were already going wrong with California have just been accelerated and have reached this sort of tipping point.
You can look at the population of California throughout our entire history. For every year it’s been tracked, from 1850 on, our population grew and grew and grew. California was the state everyone wanted to come to, it was the leading edge of the American dream. It took Gavin Newsom becoming governor for us to start moving the other way. And so now, for three straight years, our population has declined. California has led the nation in U-Haul rentals. We just lost a seat in Congress with reapportionment. And indeed, I saw a recent analysis showing that if you were to see the trends continue for the rest of this decade, we will lose five seats in Congress.
So, people are leaving the state in staggering numbers. And it’s no secret why: all of the detrimental facets of life in California, like the homelessness situation, like crime, like the cost of living, like the failing public schools that we have. These are trends that were long in the making, but they’ve gone into hyperdrive under Newsom. Because he has, on the one hand, taken the sort of radicalism of some of his predecessors and of the legislature and put it on steroids. And on the other hand, he has been even more shameless than his predecessors or our legislature in simply selling his powers to the highest bidder.
When it comes to, for example, education, he shut down schools longer than any governor in the entire country because it was the teachers unions who were responsible for him becoming governor in the first place. I think that there are many Democrats across the country who are very wary of Gavin Newsom becoming a standard-bearer for the party because he just so perfectly represents what many people believe is the failure of California as a state.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: So, do you think he’s relieved to have you in Congress and focused a little bit more nationally and a little bit less on him?
Kiley: I do not. I think he might have been at first. But that was probably short-lived because I have certainly not in any way let him off the hook for what he’s doing to our state.
And in fact, I think that now being in Congress, in some sense, I have a greater ability to focus public attention on or connect the dots between the declining quality of life in our state and his failures as governor and the failures of the entire political class that he represents. And then we also have more levers at our disposal at the national level to try to, you know, bring accountability. There are various ways in which federal funds are being misused and where the federal government has an oversight role.
But then, finally, whether he’s running for president or not, Newsom has said many times that he thinks California is a model for the nation. And we’re seeing the Biden administration has copied California’s policies in any number of ways — when it comes to laws restricting freelance work, when it comes to crime, when it comes to immigration, when it comes to many other labor laws.
And they’ve taken California political figures and put them in the administration, like Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra or Vice President Kamala Harris, now Julie Su, who [President Joe] Biden wants to make labor secretary. So, in some sense, having served in the California legislature and fought against Newsom and the supermajority in every way that I could has been the perfect preparation for the battles we now face as a country. And I think that it is vitally important that we do not adopt this failed California model as a nation.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: You’re a freshman congressman in D.C. Is it as dysfunctional as you might have expected walking in?
Kiley: D.C. certainly has a distinctive political culture. And it’s very different than being in the state legislature. But I actually have found my first six months to be very encouraging as far as how much we are able to accomplish on a daily basis.
With D.C., there’s a much greater level of public interest and scrutiny that goes into every hearing and everything that happens. And so, you do have a much greater ability to sort of contribute to the public debate. Or if you have an exchange with an administration official in a hearing, that can actually then induce some positive action, or it can at least change the tenor of the debate.
Of course, being in the majority in the House when we have divided government I think makes our role even more important. Because we have right now a situation where people across the country are highly dissatisfied with the direction of the country. And the House is sort of the one check that we have on continuing down that path that so many Americans are unhappy with.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: It seems that whenever someone enters Congress, of course they cast votes on everything under the sun, but they also develop a few areas where they’re really focusing their legislative attention. What are they for you so far?
Kiley: Well, there’s a few things. I have introduced a bill to end sanctuary policies nationwide. And you know, California, of course, is a sanctuary state. So, the sort of policies that you have in some of these cities — we have them for the whole state — that interfere with the ability of local law enforcement to coordinate with the immigration authorities when there’s a dangerous person that’s in the country illegally who has been arrested or convicted or is guilty of a crime and they want to deport them, we’re not able to have that coordination. So, I’ve introduced what I believe is the first-ever stand-alone bill to end sanctuary policies on a nationwide basis. The border is a top priority for all of us. We passed the Border Security [and Enforcement] Act, which is a very important piece of legislation.
A second area that’s been a big focus of my attention is protecting the right to earn a living and the right to work. And so that has primarily concerned the attempts by the Biden administration to copy at the national level a bill known as A.B. 5 in California, which banned independent contracting, the ability to be your own boss, to be self-employed, and to be a freelancer. They want to basically get rid of that model, bring everyone under the W-2 employment relationship, and take away your freedom to work under the circumstances that you choose. So, that’s been a big focus, trying to stop those efforts in Congress and at the Labor Department.
And also trying to stop the nominee who was responsible for enforcing A.B. 5 in California, Julie Su. She was California’s state labor secretary, and they’re trying to make her Biden’s labor secretary now. So I’ve been leading the charge against that nomination. And now we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve stalled the nomination. She’s been stalled longer than any nominee ever, under these circumstances.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: So, the Biden administration is going all in on their “Bidenomics” campaign. They’re essentially trying to claim credit for the state of the economy despite how Americans have struggled with inflation and the fact that real wages have gone down under the Biden administration.
Obviously, you’re a critic of Bidenomics. But what’s the agenda that you are putting forward as an alternative to the public?
Kiley: Well, we’ve seen what works. And it’s the opposite of what they’re now billing as Bidenomics, which I think is pretty farcical when you look at the actual condition of our economy and what Americans tell you their opinion is on their own financial situation. The administration seems to think that they can just sort of conceal that reality by coming up with some new catchphrase and continuing to hammer in the same failed policies.
You look at how the economy was doing before the COVID shutdowns and before the Biden administration came in, and we were doing really well. Our policies were working. We cut taxes. We rolled back all kinds of regulations. We were trying to, or we should have been trying to, get spending under control. Certainly, we weren’t spending at the levels that we’re spending now. And so, you know, it’s really not that complicated. We can just look at exactly the ways in which this administration changed our economic policy.
The economic record of this administration is one of the worst that we have ever seen. I think that Americans overwhelmingly agree with that. And I don’t think that giving it some new term is going to change their opinion.
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WASHINGTON EXAMINER: So, turning to the 2024 GOP primary, do you have a candidate? Have you made an endorsement? Or will you be staying out of it?
Kiley: At this point, it’s definitely not my focus. You know, I just was in an election myself not that long ago. And so, I’ve been focused on doing what we can right now to hold the administration accountable and to put the brakes on these federal policies. Because frankly, I think that we can’t wait till a new president is sworn in until 2025 to stop a lot of what’s been going on. We need to start to change the trajectory now.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and Washington Examiner contributor.
