It’s recall deadline day + Police decertification battle back on + Cyber flashing ban
Good morning and welcome to the A.M. Alert!
RECALL WATCH
Programming note: Capitol Alert is launching a way to get recall news via text. You’ll get daily updates and breaking news about the effort to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom from political reporter Lara Korte.Exclusively for our newsletter subscribers, we’re offering one month of text updates free. Click here to sign up for your free month.
Via Lara Korte...
The anti-recall campaign continued on Tuesday with Gov. Gavin Newsom appearing on the daytime talk show “The View” to talk about what the effort to unseat him is “really about.”
“What is this really about?” Whoopi Goldberg asked the governor, who appeared by video call. “Because I think you’ve done a pretty damn good job in this gigantic state of keeping it together in circumstances where you didn’t get a lot of help.”
Newom hit on the same messages California Democrats have been touting for weeks: claiming the recall is a Republican effort full of QAnon conspiracy theorists, radical anti-maskers and Trump supporters.
The governor did concede, however, that the effort is probably going to trigger a recall election.
“In 25 months, there’s been six efforts to put a recall on the ballot, and this one appears to have the requisite signatures,” he said. Newsom also tried to make the point that the recall is an attack on Democratic values around things like immigration, climate change, and minimum wage.
Today, St. Patrick’s day, is the final day for the recall to submit signatures to county elections officials. Even though organizers say they have more than 2 million signatures, we likely won’t know until the end of April whether the campaign has the 1.5 million valid signatures needed to put a recall on the ballot.
Vice President Kamala Harris said she spoke with Newsom on Monday while she was in between stops in Las Vegas. According to the press pool, “the Vice President spoke with California Governor Gavin Newsom and reiterated her support for the Governor.”
The California GOP, for its part, is not a fan of the Newsom team’s offensive strategy. Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson took issue with the governor’s attempts to paint the recall as an effort by a bunch of white supremacists, QAnon supporters and militia members.
“It shows how truly desperate he is and out of touch with the average Californian who has been devastated by his gross incompetence and disgusted by his hypocrisy,” Patterson said in a statement.
DECERTIFICATION, TAKE TWO
Via Hannah Wiley...
The final night of the 2019-2020 legislative session left behind a mess of unfinished business in the California Capitol.
One high-profile bill that died in the Assembly with the midnight deadline was a proposal to allow decertification of law enforcement officers with troubled records. Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, wrote the bill as part of a legislative response to the 2020 nationwide protests against police brutality.
Bradford has reintroduced a nearly identical plan with Senate Bill 2, this time with Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, signing on as co-author.
“If last year’s nationwide summer protests and calls for police reform have shown us anything,” Bradford said at a press confernce Tuesday, “it’s that Californians want more than superficial change. We don’t just want to talk about it, to nibble around the edges.”
Law enforcement agencies staunchly opposed last year’s proposal, calling it an “unnecessary” and “unprecedented” attempt to unfairly and over-broadly crack down on officers.
In a statement to an Assembly committee considering the bill, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen said that “a peace officer cannot possibly do their job if there’s always a lingering fear that even if they do the job by the book and up to policy standard, they could still potentially face a civil action.”
With Atkins already on board, Bradford and his Democratic colleagues said they’re hopeful Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, will push for the bill’s passage in his chamber.
In an emailed statement, Rendon spokeswoman Katie Talbot said the speaker “wants to see what is the strongest possible legislation on this issue.”
“Strength in terms of effectiveness,” she said, “and strength in terms of its ability to pass the Legislature and be signed.”
UNSOLICITED NUDES BAN GETS COMMITTEE APPROVAL
Sen. Connie Leyva’s bill making it a crime to send unsolicited lewd pictures and videos via text got a stamp approval on Tuesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Chino Democrat said that it is critical to call out and punish “cyber flashing,” which she described as a “modern form of sexual harassment that seems to only be increasing in frequency and boldness.”
“No Californian should ever be sent a sexually explicit picture or video without their consent, and when it happens, it is important that we hold those perpetrators accountable for their offensive behavior,” Leyva said.
The bill, SB 53, is sponsored by dating app company Bumble. A similar bill was introduced last year, but was pulled along with many other pieces of legislation to clear the deck for lawmakers to deal with a rapidly ascending pandemic crisis.
Leyva’s office cites the Pew Research Center’s findings that 53% of young American women and 37% of young American men have been sent unsolicited sexually explicit material while online
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“You don’t have to like Dianne Feinstein to see that pushing her out of her elected position for a Black woman appointment that you could have made when there was an actual vacancy to win a recall to push you out of your elected position is a very bad look.”
- Christine Pelosi, via Twitter.
Best of the Bee:
By dangling Feinstein’s seat, Newsom hopes to shore up support as he enters a challenging year. The only problem: Feinstein has four years left in this term. Of course, progressive Democrats have been pushing her to retire early. Newsom’s announcement will only increase the pressure, via Gil Duran. (OPINION)
Julie Su — and for that matter, California’s embattled unemployment system — were sharply criticized by Senate Republicans Tuesday, via David Lightman.
A surge in gun sales — fueled by economic insecurity, racial and political unrest and the pandemic — isn’t slowing down in California, home to some of the strictest gun laws in the country, via Ryan Sabalow.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has expanded a ban on political consultants lobbying him and his administration to include unpaid consultants, according to a memo obtained by The Sacramento Bee, via Sophia Bollag.