Republicans vote to oust Mayes
He will be replaced as Assembly leader by Brian Dahle from Lassen County
In a leadership shakeup linked to last month’s bipartisan climate deal, Assembly Republicans on Thursday voted in a closed-door meeting to replace Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes with their colleague Brian Dahle, a farmer from Lassen County.
Mayes’ support was critical for the extension of the state’s landmark cap-andtrade program, and many on the left heralded him as a profile in courage. But party activists saw his collaboration as capitulation, and even betrayal, and he had been under intense pressure to resign.
Mayes, a Yucca Valley lawmaker who has led the caucus since early 2016, withstood a leadership challenge this week by some members of his caucus, but said the group would hold an election on Tuesday. Instead, the 25-member caucus met Thursday and quickly emerged with a unanimous decision to elect Dahle. Mayes — who supported Dahle’s bid — will remain leader through the end of the legislative session, Sept. 15.
“The Republican caucus just elected a new Republican leader,” Mayes announced on the floor. “That leader is from the major metropolis of Bieber in the North State. Please welcome Assembly Republican Leader, Assemblymember Brian Dahle.”
Dahle, a farmer, represents a swath of rural Northern California, a district that includes parts of Lassen, Modoc, Klamath and Plumas national forests. He lives in Bieber, a Lassen County city, population 300, with his wife and three children.
“Chad Mayes did an outstanding job as our leader,” Dahle said Thursday in a statement from the caucus. “I look forward to picking up where he left off and continuing the fight to articulate conservative principles in a way that resonates with everyday Californians.”
The overthrow of Mayes is not shocking, said Bruce Cain, a political scientist and director of Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.
The problem for the California Republican Party, Cain said, is that pressure to adhere to party principles — even at the expense of pragmatism and bipartisanship — and align with the national GOP has forced it to be “way more conservative” than the California electorate.
“As a result, they get in a deeper and deeper hole,” Cain said. “The Republican party has never been as marginalized since the Depression as it is right now.”
Stephen Woolpert, a political science professor at St. Mary’s College, said the penalty Mayes paid for bipartisanship shows how politically risky compromise has become.
“This is a bill that should have been seen as common ground in California, where there is strong support for climate change policies,” Woolpert said. “The party is in such a double-bind. If it tries to broaden its base, which in some ways it has to do, it risks alienating the Republican activists who think that bipartisanship is betrayal.”
Dahle, a conservative, does have a reputation for working across the aisle. But, like most of his colleagues, he voted against the bill to extend cap-andtrade through 2030. The market-based program is designed to prod industry to emit less global-warming greenhouse gases by forcing them to acquire a steadily shrinking number of permits per ton of carbon released into the atmosphere.
Mayes has argued that embracing climate-change action and other issues important to Californians is the only way forward for a party that has watched its base grow ever smaller. He and six members of his caucus voted for the businessfriendly deal they helped to negotiate — and which Big Oil and other major industry groups supported — pushing it to victory.
But, as Mayes discovered, helping Democrats on the controversial bill — and celebrating its victory afterward — was a bridge too far for party activists, who circulated chummy photos of him with Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and others. He said this week that he was surprised by the intensity of the backlash. But until Thursday morning, it appeared that he would try to keep his post.
State party leaders took the unusual step last week of calling for his replacement, a motion brought by Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco lawyer who accused Mayes of trying to make the state party “Democrat lite.”
“I’m relieved — I won’t call it a victory or a celebration — that the struggle has come to an end in a positive way, with a unanimous vote,” Dhillon said Thursday afternoon.
Rendon, D-South Gate, injected a lighthearted note in his statement about the leadership change, alluding to his well-known, acrossthe-aisle friendship with Mayes.
“Chad Mayes is a good man who worked hard to balance doing what was right for California and meeting the needs of his caucus. Personally, I will miss working with Chad as Republican leader,” Rendon said. “But make no mistake, the bromance will endure.”
Gov. Jerry Brown, who spearheaded the cap-andtrade negotiations, bemoaned the Mayes ouster. “Sad day,” he tweeted Thursday, “when the Grand Old Party punishes a leader whose only flaw was believing in science & cutting regs, costs & taxes for Californians.”
Contact Katy Murphy at 916-441-2101.