Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon may have survived a coup, for now, but he had it coming
A few months ago I attempted to schedule a meeting between Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and The Bee Editorial Board. I was told, however, that Mr. Rendon was still upset with me over a column I wrote about him back in 2020.
Harboring a grudge for more than 18 months seemed goofy. And, truthfully, it was hard to know if Rendon himself was still upset or his staff was. But whatever.
Ghosting the media when you don’t like the accountability portion of a free press is not only the default setting for Donald Trump supporters like Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones and Kevin Kiley, Jones’ smarmy opponent for the 3rd Congressional District.
In this case, the office of the leader of the state Assembly seemed to believe that the speaker should be above reproach. The message to me seemed to be that Rendon would only give his time to media members who didn’t criticize him harshly. After 30 years in Sacramento, it’s been my experience that political offices that behave this way invite trouble — or that trouble finds them.
What kind of trouble? The kind all politicians face: a crisis you don’t see coming until it spills out in full view.
That kind of trouble found Rendon this week, didn’t it? A portion of his caucus tried to take him out, whack him and replace him. A coup came to Sacramento, and it was hilarious.
Robert Rivas, a San Benito County Democrat, may have had the votes at some point on Tuesday to replace the soon-to-be-termed-out Rendon.
The possibility that Rivas did have the votes invited a day of comedy for those of us who didn’t have to wait around for more than six hours while Rendon and Rivas went underground and a supermajority of assembly Democrats voted on Rendon’s fate in real time.
Well, the proverbial assassins missed. They didn’t have the 41 votes to dump Rendon right now. How many did they have? Maybe 20? Maybe 30? Or maybe some of those were half votes of members who liked Rivas but liked Rendon, too.
It was so passively aggressive Sacramento.
Rendon held on, but it wasn’t good. It looked ridiculous and was reminiscent of that time, back in 2020, when I whacked Rendon in print for insisting his members vote in person at the height of the pandemic.
Who could forget the iconic image of member Buffy Wicks, wearing a mask and holding her newborn baby, because Rendon denied her a proxy vote and effectively made her schlep all the way to Sacramento from Oakland? Vogue Magazine covered it, for crying out loud. Hillary Clinton took to Twitter in Wicks’ defense before I wrote a single word in The Bee.
I have colleagues who tell me Rendon is a very nice guy. I wouldn’t know because I’m not going to chase any politician or grovel before any Capitol staffer. The point is that a mature, self-aware office as important as Rendon’s should have taken its lumps for creating a visual as powerful and ridiculous as Wicks clutching her baby at the Capitol because she had to be there on Rendon’s say-so.
When you don’t take your lumps and instead get angry at the media members whose job it is to hold you accountable, well, then you’re asking for trouble. You’re saying you should be above criticism.
That kind of hubris makes what happened on Tuesday possible. Sorry-not-sorry for saying so in print.
