Gavin Opens His Freak Show to the Public

public fights nausea

Gavin Newsom’s redistricting effort is going to go poorly. It’s Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. He’s going to lose control of it. That loss of control started in earnest today, at the opening of the plan.

Background first.

Most people don’t pay attention to the California legislature, and I understand that choice. It’s a full-time legislature in a country full of part-time legislatures, and it churns out bills at an obscene volume. You can’t really pay attention. No one can track 2,000 bills a year, or 1,100 new laws a year. On the final day of its last session in the summer of 2024, the Assembly slammed its last box lot of bills through like this (click the link to play the video):

Thirty seconds per bill. The game where they pretend they can’t hear the small Republican opposition is one they only play on days ending in -y. There are a bunch of variations on this game, like turning off Republican microphones and the one where they interrupt Republican floor debate over and over again because the chair just remembered that it’s somebody’s birthday and they need to offer birthday wishes.

When they speak, Democrats in the California legislature are repulsive. Words fail me. They make disgusting arguments, poorly, and ooze slime while they do it. There are a dozen people in the state legislature who cause me an immediate case of contact nausea, with the not-obviously-human and distinctly reptilian Marc Berman leading the way. I’ve written about some of the examples, so I won’t revisit them, but watching legislative debate in California can make a sane person feel like it’s possible to get herpes through the computer screen. And they tend to be so stupid they can barely form sentences. As a single, simple reminder of how they think and argue:

So what if your child can get pharmaceutical products without your knowledge and consent, parents — your 12 year-old can already get secret abortions and secret STD treatments, so what’s the big deal? If her lover beats your middle-schooler, you’re not gonna know that her doctor had to suture her up, so whatever. Reptiles in human form. Horrible people.

If you’re wondering how a legislature becomes this disconnected from ordinary human values and extremely basic common sense, California is a blue-model machine with thoroughly Democratic districts that would elect a lump of actual crap before it would vote for someone with an (R) behind their names. If you get the party machinery behind you, and one certain endorsement, you win the seat. Campaigns aren’t really campaigns in any usual sense. My state senator’s campaign was that every week for a couple of months we got a mailer that said her name next to the Planned Parenthood logo. With third world infrastructure, miserable taxes, notoriously poor services, and an ongoing structural deficit, Democrats win seats in the state legislature by saying PLANNED PARENTHOOD PLANNED PARENTHOOD PLANNED PARENTHOOD. They honor the state religion, and chant its liturgy, so they govern.

Name+PLANNED PARENTHOOD+(D)=state legislator, after which your critics can have their microphone switched off during debate.

So.

The Elections Committee of the California Assembly heard the bill to redistrict California today, and ohhhh boy. You can watch the whole thing here, but have a bucket or trash can nearby for the vomiting. All of the extremely normal games I described above were played in this hearing, shocking no one. If you don’t want to sacrifice your sanity by watching the whole thing, you can watch a particular exchange here:

Sample screenshot, and look at the closed captioning as Marc Berman responds to a question from one of the two Republicans on the seven-member committee:

Republicans asked a series of questions: Who drew the redistricting maps, why are the maps drawn this way, why did they change after they were first released, and so on. The answers, consistently, were some form of the statement that we’re not prepared to tell you that, but Orange Man Bad. After which the chair prevented further questions from the Republicans, and told them their questions had already been answered, which was a fairly naked lie to tell right there in the room. Look at the closed captioning again for a sample response to a Republican from the Democratic chair:

Here’s another short video excerpt of questions from Republican Vice-Chair Alexandra Macedo:

And here’s another sample response from the chair:

Second and quite similar example:

The question who drew the maps, getting no answer, became the immediate theme of the news coverage, with Democrats again refusing to answer, using the nauseating tactics of pretending to not notice the question or pretending to not have the list right here with me. Click the link to play the video:

Second example, and click this link to play the video:

They’re not good at this. Machine-managed legislators who usually do their work in abbreviated and tightly controlled processes, controlling the microphones and using the chair to silence questions, are wading into a national controversy that will draw considerable and sustained scrutiny. They aren’t ready. They’re awkward, they’re creating controversies that they should have been able to anticipate but still haven’t planned for, and they’re going to embarrass themselves over and over again. Also, I beg California Democrats to make Marc Berman the face of the redistricting effort. The question that no one would answer today, who drew the maps, isn’t going away. Refusing to answer it didn’t blunt the question. It did the opposite, drawing attention to the question.

The answer will probably not be surprising. When California Democrats held a press conference a few days ago to roll out the redistricting plan, one of the prominent speakers was Jodi Hicks, the president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the organization that you need an endorsement from to win public office in most of the state. Jodi Hicks is married to Paul Mitchell, the president of a company called…Redistricting Partners. Huge mystery, right?

Politico, four days ago:

Laugh-out-loud funny to watch Democrats squirm and refuse to say who drew the maps as mainstream media cheerfully announces that the husband of the president of of the state’s Planned Parenthood organization drew the maps. The whole gong show is hilariously awkward, in completely obvious ways, and it’s already trending downward. In a state where a lot of state-level politics goes under the radar, Democrats are making a bunch of rushed and half-considered moves that will be noticed a lot.