Authoritarianism, Golden State Style

Welcome to the Democratic People’s Republic of California

Despite having a supermajority in the state Assembly and Senate, and a stranglehold on the mayor’s offices, city councils, and county boards of supervisors in the most populated regions of the state, the California Democratic Party still routinely resorts to backroom chicanery and subterfuge to advance its agenda. The most recent example is a steaming pile of legislation called Senate Bill 607 (SB 607).

In a nutshell, SB 607 would all but gut California’s landmark Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Passed with unanimous bipartisan support in the legislature and signed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970, CEQA is the most consequential state environmental law ever passed in this country, and arguably in the world. It requires environmental review of proposed construction projects, from single family homes to improvements at airports to expansions of public infrastructure like water and power systems. In its 55 year history it has fundamentally altered the way Californians, Americans, and the world approach the relationship between economic and physical growth on the one hand, and the environmental impacts and costs on the other. It isn’t perfect — no law is — but on balance it has done enormous good. Now, California Democrats, until recently fervid guardians of environmental laws, want to dismantle it, because, they say, it’s getting in the way of real estate speculators making a buck. The times, they be changing.

SB 607 immediately opened major rifts between the Party and its traditional base of support among environmental groups and organized labor. The bill also sparked backlash from dozens of cities. In March, some 127 environmental groups sent a letter to state Senators asking them to oppose the bill. The signatories included the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and EarthJustice.

They didn’t mince words, writing, “[I]n scenario after scenario, the bill’s language makes no sense and undermines the very rationales for the exemptions. Trying to apply the language of SB 607 to likely situations results in an analysis that is simply confounding and nonsensical.” Well, then. To paraphrase President Lyndon Johnson’s observation about Walter Cronkite and Vietnam, if the California Democrats have lost the Sierra Club, they’ve lost Californians.

Part of the header of the “NASCAR” letter environmental groups sent to Sacramento. NASCAR letters so called because they’re signed by many organizations, like the ads on a stock car.

In other words, a substantial majority of Californians opposed the bill. In the face of such pushback, the bill’s sponsor, state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) pulled the bill and gutted it. That’s how democracy works — in theory. People and groups of people speak, and their elected representatives heed their words and proceed accordingly. However, if you think that’s how it worked with SB 607, you haven’t followed California politics lately. You see, California Democrats really want to pass this bill. Their paymasters in finance, real estate, and tech demand it. They’re not going to let something as quaint and passé as the will of the people get in their way.

Wiener only pulled the bill after Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would seek to pass it via the budgetary process. Even shopworn Sacramento observers initially were puzzled by his announcement. Then talk about the bill died away and people moved on to other, almost equally awful bills, like SB 79. Just like they knew it would.

On Tuesday evening, Newsom brought SB 607 back from the dead. He announced that he will not sign the 2025-2026 state budget unless it includes one of two “trailer bills.” Trailer bills are linked to the proposed budget, called the Budget Act, and must include at least one appropriation. Trailer bills are organized by issue area, such as “health,” “housing,” “higher education,” and “public safety.”

Tailer bills originally were intended for technical, non-substantive fixes, but now around half of policy changes happen via these hooks. This is a huge change, and one that exemplifies Sacramento’s continuing erasure of its own transparency rules, norms, and traditions in the name of political expedience. Because they are supposed to be minor tweaks, trailer bills do not go through the normal legislative process. There’s no public comment, no public committee hearings, no committee votes, no floor votes. In fact, they don’t even have to be introduced until 72 hours before the budget vote, hence Newsom’s Tuesday evening announcement.

The proposed trailer that would incorporate “negotiated components” of SB 607 (there’s a whopper of a political euphemism for you) is over 65,000 words and 160 single spaced pages. For comparison, Stephen King’s masterpiece Carrie is 60,581 words long. The United States Constitution and its amendments, which have guided the nation for 250 years through wars, civil war, depressions, domestic unrest, catastrophic natural disasters, terror attacks, and Katy Perry, is just 7,591 words.

Written in dense legalese that’s challenging even for lawyers, it would take the average person at least eight or ten hours to read and (sort of) understand what’s going on with zombie SB 607. Newsom is giving lawmakers, reporters, observers, advocates, and average Californians three days to do all that reading. Of course, no one will read it. No one will have the slightest idea what those 65,000 words will do to the law, to CEQA, and to the future of environmental protection in California.

They’ll have to pass it so we can find out what’s in it. One politician, Newsom, is holding the entire California state budget, the budget of the world’s fourth largest economy, hostage. If he doesn’t get the housing legislation he wants — legislation that polls consistently show Californians oppose by a 3-1 margin — he’ll torpedo the entire state.

No matter how you slice it, this is old fashioned authoritarianism. 

What’s more, Newsom is taking this one man stand against the people on the shakiest of grounds. There is broad disagreement over the extent to which CEQA has negatively impacted housing development. It’s far from settled, much less to the point that it would justify, if it ever could, this kind of anti-democratic maneuvering.

Let’s recap: A lawmaker introduces a bill seeking to gut critical environmental protection laws. It is immediately opposed by leading environmental groups, organized labor, hundreds of cities, countless neighborhood organizations, and individual citizens. In the face of this overwhelming response, the lawmaker pulls the bill. Two months later, on 72 hours notice, that lawmaker and the governor use an opaque procedural anomaly to ram through a bill on the same subject that is literally 20 times longer and more complex than the original one the people so roundly rejected. Finally, the governor declares that the entire state budget — funding for schools, libraries, fire departments, infrastructure, public benefits, animal control, and, yes, environmental protection — is hostage to this 65,000 word legislative novel.

No wonder that, whenever they’re caught on camera in person together, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump give off a distinct bromance vibe. Increasingly, they’re the same person.