Newsom shifts the goal posts once again

Standing in front of a gold curtain and the California Lottery’s “Big Spin” wheel on Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom picked winning numbers in the state’s vaccination lottery and then invited questions from the press as aides carried in a lectern covered by a confetti-strewn “Vax for the Win” sign.

Newsom looked dismayed that the questions were not about the lottery. Reporters asked whether he has taken steps to prevent a conflict of interest stemming from corporate donations to the nonprofit that employs his wife (he said there is no conflic of interest); they asked if he planned to use an executive order to override Cal/OSHA’s new rules requiring masks in the workplace past June 15 (he said “the dust is still settling”); they asked if state government offices would follow the same protocols on capacity restrictions as private businesses (he said he’s guided by “science, data, epidemiology”); and they asked if the state of emergency would be lifted on June 15.

The answer was no. “The emergency remains in effect after June 15,” Newsom said flatly. Why? “Because we’re still in a state of emergency. This disease has not been extinguished. It’s not vanished.”

In his State of the State speech in March, Newsom vowed that California is “not going back to normal.” Now we are seeing the mechanism he had in mind. California will remain in a state of emergency, under one-man rule, until the disease has “vanished,” a goal that may well be unattainable.

By any measure — case rate, fatality rate, hospitalizations, hospital capacity, vaccination rates, available vaccines — the conditions that prompted Newsom’s emergency declaration in March 2020 have abated. As Newsom himself bragged on Twitter, “71% of our adult population has received at least one vaccine. And we have the lowest #COVID19 case rate in the country.”

The governor has moved the goalposts again, this time clear off the field and out of the stadium.

State law defines a “state of emergency.” It may be declared when there are “conditions of disaster or of extreme peril” of a “magnitude” that makes them “likely to be beyond the control of the services, personnel, equipment, and facilities of any single county, city and county, or city.”

State law also requires the governor to end the emergency sooner rather than later. “The Governor shall proclaim the termination of a state of emergency at the earliest possible date that conditions warrant,” the California Emergency Services Act states.

The next sentence in the law may explain Newsom’s refusal to do that: “All of the powers granted the Governor by this chapter with respect to a state of emergency shall terminate when the state of emergency has been terminated.”

Newsom has issued more than 50 executive orders that suspended, amended or changed hundreds of laws affecting schools, elections, public access to government meetings, public contracts, debt collections, welfare payments, homelessness programs and more. When the state of emergency is ended, all executive orders issued under it are null and void, and the governor loses the power to impose new emergency orders unilaterally.

However, that’s the form of government the people of California authorized by their approval of the state constitution and its subsequent amendments. The deliberative legislative and regulatory processes that the governor considers an impediment to necessary orders are, in fact, the protection of the rights of all Californians from arbitrary government actions.

This isn’t a game.