Newsom Deploys Budget Weapon

As Katy Grimes noted, Governor Gavin Newsom got “most of what he wants” in California’s 2019-20 budget, including taxpayer-funded health care for those illegally present in the state. On the other hand, some regions of California will not be getting what they need, even though it was already part of the budget. 

“Gov. Gavin Newsom this week vetoed an item in the state budget that would have set aside $2.8 million to buy land for a new courthouse in the foothill county,” reports Elizabeth Schwe of the Sacramento Bee. The report cites the 106-year-old courthouse in Placerville, El Dorado County, and “Newsom is suspending or canceling $14.1 million worth of work the legislature approved,” one of only three proposals the governor rejected in California’s $215 billion budget.

As Shwe reports, and as this writer verified during the trial of Colleen Harris in 2015, the Placerville courthouse is “so small that that in-custody detainees are held in public corridors before trial due to the lack of holding space.” In similar style, jurors must meet in crowded public hallways, and attorneys have no conference rooms “to privately talk with clients, victims and witnesses.”

So no surprise that a new courthouse, Shwe writes, “is one of the judicial branch’s highest priority infrastructure projects,” ranked as a “critical need” in its capital outlay plan. Newsom vetoed the funds, claiming the $14.1 million expenditure is “premature.” Taxpayers in El Dorado County, which tends to vote Republican, have cause to wonder.

“America in 2019 is California in the 1990s,” Newsom recently told Politico. “The xenophobia, the nativism, the fear of ‘the other.’ Scapegoating. Talking down or past people. The hysteria. And so, we’re not going to put up with that. We are going to push back.” For their part, Republicans “are into the politics of what California was into in the 1990s..and they’ll go the same direction — into the waste bin of history, the way Republicans of the ‘90s have gone. That’s exactly what will happen to this crop of national Republicans.”

Gov. Newsom is also on record that Republicans are “third-party status,” and blamed it on Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. “I spent 50 years of my life in rural California in one of the reddest parts of the state, in Placer County,” Newsom explained. “We grew up with these folks, have deep respect for people in rural community.”

Newsom claimed, “I actually care about them,” adding, “I honestly am empathetic towards what they are about to experience, which is a profound demise because of their own making.”

Taxpayers across the state might note that Democrats, not Republicans, imposed the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, and now target the voter-approved Proposition 13, which limits increases in property tax. For their part, Republican taxpayers have reason to doubt claims of empathy from a man who regards their party as destined for the “waste bin of history.”

As the Sacramento Bee reports, Gov. Newsom has made California “the first state to allow undocumented adults to sign up for state-funded health coverage,” and the plan will  cost “$98 million in the upcoming fiscal year.” Gov. Newson also vetoed $14.1 million already approved for a new courthouse in El Dorado County. Residents of that county could be forgiven for seeing that veto as retribution for their voting preferences, and a sign of things to come.