California’s Newsom relishes role as Trump adversary
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Democrats who rule California took on homegrown tech giants Uber and Lyft over their workforces, convinced some of the world’s biggest automakers to buck the president on fuel emissions and passed a law that could change college sports nationwide.
On issues big and small — hotels soon will be forbidden from providing guests with little plastic shampoo bottles — California this year has marched further left and tried to pull the rest of the country with it.
The state, given the virtual irrelevance of its Republican Party, is pushing the boundaries of liberal policy, forcing Democrats to draw their own lines on the role of government, corporate responsibility and social policies.
America’s most populous state (nearly 40 million people) and home to the world’s fifth largest economy (about $3 trillion), California has long used its weight to set trends. But that role has crystallized in the Trump era, with the state emerging as the nation’s defense system against rollbacks of environmental and health care laws and the federal crackdown on illegal immigration.
Trump, meanwhile, has pointed to California as a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation, casting it as a failed state of homelessness and intrusive government.
“They have to clean it up. We can’t have our cities going to hell,” Trump told reporters last month after traveling to California to raise money for his re-election campaign.
The leader of the alternative universe is Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The first-year governor relishes being a Trump adversary and chief of a state that does things before others. Just ahead of the Oct. 13 deadline for him to act on bills, Newsom signed first-in-the nation laws requiring public universities to provide abortion medication on campuses, banning the sale and manufacture of fur products, and mandating a later start time for high schools so students could get more sleep.
“I think it’s more interesting not just responding and reacting to Trump and Trumpism, but pushing the envelope and moving our agenda and our values forward and promoting them across the country,” Newsome said recently.
Millions of people live in poverty and inequality is stark — and wasting money on programs like the $79 billion high-speed rail project that is year’s behind schedule.
State Sen. Shannon Grove pointed to gasoline that is at least $1 per gallon more than the national average and worsening homelessness.
Skepticism about some of California’s new policies goes beyond partisan grumbling. Many laws Newsom signed this year were vetoed by his predecessor, fellow Democrat Jerry Brown, who called them superfluous or too expensive. Brown blocked the bill requiring college campuses provide abortion medication, arguing the services were readily available elsewhere, and resisted a ban on smoking on state beaches, saying the power of the state should only stretch so far. Other policies, like mandating later school start times, struggled to pass in prior years, with critics arguing the new mandate would create headaches for parents and schools.
“I think they spend a lot of time on kind of silly things instead of tackling real problems, like homelessness,” said 64-year-old Elizabeth Merrill, a Democrat from Sacramento who has lived in the state for nearly four decades.