Assemblyman Anthony Portantino said Friday he was “very disappointed” to be removed as chair of the higher education committee by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and was “surprised” by the change, which he found out via an after-hours fax on Thursday night.
“All I know is that we got a fax (addressed) to Dotson Wilson (chief clerk of the Assembly) from the speaker that was on our fax machine last night after close of business,” said Portantino in a phone interview. “We got it this morning.”
“This is to advise you that I’ve created a vacancy for the chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee,” Portantino recounts the fax saying.
He remains a member of the committee and a replacement chair has not been named.
Portantino and Assemblyman Hector De La Torre were both stripped of chairmanships late Thursday. (See the previous Capitol Alert story here)
A freshman Democrat from La Cañada Flintridge, Portantino said he was “confused” about both the decision and the timing “to receive a fax at the close of business before the holiday week.”
The timing of the committee changes apparently flow from the speakership race, which concluded with Speaker-elect Karen Bass’s selection at the end of February.
But Portantino said he “can’t imagine how” that’s possible.
“We ran under the rules that were set forth by the speaker,” he said.
“I’d love to have it be about a principled policy discussion. In what direction was I taking that committee that was contrary (to the speaker’s wishes)?” he said, saying his priorities were “fighting for our kids to go to college, the institutions and the employees, I think that is the right agenda. If they wanted to change the agenda, I wished they would have called and asked to talk about it.”
Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Núñez, declined to comment calling the matter “internal caucus business.”
Portantino and De La Torre were among the 10 Democrats who campaigned for speaker, losing out the Assembly’s top job to Bass, a Los Angeles Democrat and the current number two to Núñez in the lower house.
Assemblyman Hector De La Torre lost his chairmanship of the powerful Assembly Rules Committee. De La Torre’s aides were packing boxes in their enviable third-floor office on Friday. Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, is the new chair of the rules committee.
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