With only five days left to act, Governor Gavin Newsom still had to sign or veto more than 500 bills passed by the California Legislature. A couple of significant areas of focus: abortion protection and organized labor.
Newsom signed a bill that boosted the state’s disability and family paid-leave programs for all workers, and a measure that would create a fast food industry regulator.
But perhaps most surprising was his approval of Assembly Bill 2183, which allows farmworkers to vote in union elections by mail, rather than in person, which was previously required.
The governor was a longtime opponent of the bill, but mounting pressure within the Democratic Party influenced him to give it the green light — with a condition. That’s according to Jeremy White, a California Politics reporter for Politico.
“He signed it with a very unusual agreement to support language next year that essentially creates a new, different bill,” White says.
Newsom also signed a number of abortion-related bills that provide more protection and funding for the health procedure. One such measure prohibits California from enforcing other states’ anti-abortion laws.
“Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade … legislators and the governor were talking about making California a haven for abortion care, ensuring that not only Californians could access it, but that people could travel from other states [for it]. And so a lot of what was signed into law this year was an effort to create that bastion of care,” White says.
He adds that voters will later choose whether to enshrine abortion into the state’s constitution, and he expects that to pass broadly.
Meanwhile, what did Newsom veto? Bills that would make kindergarten mandatory, ban solitary confinement in state prisons, and create safe injection sites for drug users.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the governor making a possible presidential run. White says it’s clear that Newsom is “sculpting a national profile, and his vetoes — particularly of the safe injection sites bill, an idea he has supported in the past — are part of that effort.”
“I think any governor, particularly of a state as big as California, has to do that balancing of interests in the old Jerry Brown ‘paddle left, paddle right,’” White adds. “But certainly people are scrutinizing the governor's moves … much more through a national lens as he works to elevate his national profile.”