The Public Sector Unions Own the California Legislature

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gavin Newsom made headlines a couple weeks ago with his
May revision to the budget. So the way it works is,
we have a budget in the state of California. It
runs from July through June. The governor in January introduces
his budget proposal, and then after April fifteenth, tax Day,

(00:24):
when the state has a better handle on how much
revenue it's actually received rather than estimates of how much
revenue it's received, the governor then introduces a may revise,
as it's called, a revised version of the state budget,
and then works with lawmakers to get a budget passed. Well,
Newsome created a ton of anger on the left with

(00:52):
his May revise to the budget. Now, Gavin Newsom is
no great hero. The budget is in a as shape.
We're facing something like a ten billion dollar deficit. So
Newsom is having to cut things he did not want
to cut. He's having to increase certain kinds of costs,

(01:12):
for example, charging one hundred dollars premiums for medical certain
medical beneficiaries, and he has infuriated people on the left.
I cannot stress this enough that people on the left
are big time mad at Gavin Newsom. Now it's not again,

(01:32):
I just want to reiterate it's not like he's some
paragon of spending restraint. He is just the governor. The
buck ultimately stops with him. He has to sign. He
is the last step in any budget talks because he's
the one who actually has to sign the bill, and
he also has there's no one else to whom he

(01:53):
can kind of pass the buck of responsibility. One individual
state assembly member out of eighty can always pass the
buck to somebody else and say, oh, that's what the
group of us decided. One state senator out of forty
can do the same thing. He can't, And California can't

(02:16):
just keep indefinitely spending into the red. Eventually people will
stop loaning California money. That's the thing. California can't print
money the way the federal government can. Federal government can
spend into the red in a way that state governments can't.
State and local governments can't spend into the red indefinitely.
And this has always been an instinct that the California

(02:39):
governor has relative to the state legislature, that the governor
winds up having to be the adult in the room
when the state legislature doesn't want to be or and
frankly doesn't have to be. This was the dynamic under
Jerry Brown and it's been I think Newsom has been
less of an adult than Jerry Brown was, but himself

(03:00):
has to kind of pump the brakes on the Democrats
in the state legislature. So Newsom introduces his initial budget
bill in January. He initially he introduces his may revision,
and the state legislature, the Assembly, in the State Senate
have introduced their proposal and clearly they're rolling back a

(03:22):
lot of Newsom's cuts, things that Newsom was going to cut,
or maybe it may just be with baseline budgeting that
he's not actually cutting it. He's just reducing the rate
of growth. They're rolling back a bunch of his cuts
because it's not nice thing. I don't like it with
no sense of math. So I want to read through

(03:44):
this just so you guys can understand this dynamic one
the dynamic of the state legislation. If you think Gavin
Newsom is bad, and certainly he is bad, understand that
the state legislature is worse, okay, understand that the Democrats
in the state legislature are actually worse. When it comes

(04:06):
to fiscal responsibility than Gavin Newsom is. And secondly, there's
the whole story about this, this budget proposal from the
state legislature, written by Nicole Nixon in the Fresno Beat.
I assume she's a McClatchy Sacramento person. This story. What

(04:32):
it also, I think really reveals is how powerful public
sector unions are in California. Public sector unions rule in Sacramento.
They control everything, and they were the ones super ticked
off at Newsom. And there are two different areas where

(04:53):
they were really ticked off at Newsome that I will
dive into. Democratic lawmakers plan to reject billions in proposed
cuts to California healthcare and social services in order to
fill a roughly twelve billion dollar deficit, But a spending
agreement announced by legislative leaders Monday would still include a
freeze on enrollment for undocumented adults to medical, the state's

(05:15):
income health program. So the most news grabbing thing Newsom
did was halting signing up illegal alien adults for medical,
which is a really embarrassing rollback of a signature Newsom
policy that Neewso was bragging and both, oh, I'm going

(05:35):
to expand medical eligibility to everyone in California, even illegal aliens.
The shortfall, which lawmakers and Governor Gavenusom blamed on President
Donald Trump's trade policies, this is the biggest hong Ko
crap that we are facing structural deficits in California, where

(05:57):
year over year we're going to have ten billion to
twenty billion plus deficits because we have increased our spending
commitments at a pace that is not commensurate with the
revenue we bring in in taxes. And they're gonna the
Democrats in the legislature are gonna come out there and
try to convince understanding adults that the Trump tariffs that's

(06:25):
the reason. That's the reason we're facing a ten billion
dollar deficit, which oddly enough, we had a ten billion
plus or so deficit last year when Trump didn't have
his tarots and tariffs. Then we had a big deficit
the year prior to that, and we're gonna have a
big deficit next year. Trump's tariffs are not the reason

(06:46):
why we have a twelve billion dollar deficit. If you
want to argue with me that Trump's tariffs have not
been helpful, okay, fine, But the fundamentally they are not
creating a twelve billion dollar California state deficit that is insane.

(07:07):
The budget shortfall presents a challenge for Golden state leaders
who are loathed to cut services for California's poor and
undocumented residents. How about the documented residents like me? You're
not loath to cut any services to me, but for
the for the poor. I don't mind you wanting to

(07:28):
help the poor. But you know, why are we so
concerned about the undocumented residents rather than the documented ones?
Like being undocumented makes you a particular object for you know,
tender care and concern. If anything, it should make you
maybe less of an object because you're technically not supposed

(07:49):
to be here. Newsom last month proposed the partial medical
freeze and adding one hundred dollars premiums to pay for
rising costs. His spending plan also included, which, by the way,
is necessary. Medical is in disastrous financial shape. We have
too many people taking up too many services, not enough

(08:11):
money to pay the doctors who are performing the services.
Medical reimbursement is already terribly dreadful for doctors. They lose
money taking care of medical patients. So just to keep
adding more people to the pool of medical beneficiaries without
proportionately at least increasing the pool of money available is insane.

(08:32):
So you something has to give, and the give that
Newsom has proposed is one hundred dollars premiums one hundred
dollars premiums for medical beneficiaries. Newsom spending plan also included
a nearly eight percent cut to state higher education systems

(08:54):
and salary freezes for state workers. I'm betting that that's
an eight percent cut to the planned rate of increase.
That's just my guess. I don't know that for a fact.
It seems just strikes me as ad. And salary freezes
for state workers, ding ding, Ding, ding Ding. Salary freezes

(09:14):
for state workers. Also, every employee of a state higher
education institution is a state employee. This is where public
sector unions come in. They don't like salary freezes for
state workers. They don't like cuts for higher education because

(09:36):
higher education is full of worthless state workers. State lawmakers
must pass a budget bill by June fifteenth. Newsome must
sign it by the end of the month. Speaker of
the Assembly, Robert Reeves, a Democrat from Hollister, and State

(09:57):
Senate President pro temporary Mike mcguah i, a Democrat from
Santa Rosa, want to reject some of Newsom's proposed cuts
and delay many others. All right, so for medical, here's
what they want to do. Here's their solution. They know
medical is in terrible shape. Medical is not going to
be fixed even by one hundred dollars premiums. So they sorry,

(10:24):
one hundred dollars per month premiums. So instead they want
thirty dollars per month premiums. You're still not fixing the problem.
You're you're just sending us further into the hole. The
legislature also wants to reject Newsom's proposed cuts to in
home supportive services. Well, what do you want to cut?

(10:50):
We are in a hole. We have to cut something.
Both lawmakers and the governor want to end medical coverage
for weight loss rugs, which could save eighty five million
dollars in the first year and up to six hundred
and eighty million in twenty twenty eight. Now this is
the insanity. I'm sure if my mom is listening to this,
she's like going nuts hearing this that they want to

(11:11):
end medical coverage for weight loss drugs. I assume that's
like ozempic and other other types of drugs like that.
There's so much research coming out about the unbelievable benefits
of these drugs, especially for obese people, that I'm sort
of wondering, well, maybe that might not be a great

(11:32):
idea to cut medical funding for these for those drugs,
I mean, like like the enormous health benefits you get
over for for not being obese rather than OBEs or
like borderline incalculable. So maybe that would actually be a
sound long term financial investment for medical if people could
you know, be on ozempic for a bit and instead

(11:53):
of you know, type two diabetes and you know all
the various health problems that come with obese. Anyway, it's uncle.
And so here's the Democrats who are like, Okay, here's
all these things Newsome wants to cut. We're not gonna
cut it. We're gonna restore funding for this. Even the

(12:14):
Sacramento Bee story has to say it's unclear how the
smaller cuts to medical and IHSS services would be paid for. No,
it's perfectly clear they wouldn't be paid for it. There's
no unclarity there. They are spending way beyond what we have.
That's the clarity here. Senators then have the bright idea.

(12:43):
That's me calling it a bright idea that's not in
the Sacramento Bee story. Senators will explore imposing a larger
employer contribution for companies whose workers are enrolled in medical
According to the Senate Budget Committee's outline of the spending plan,
this recognizes that large employers benefit from their employees being

(13:04):
enrolled in taxpayer funded health programs instead of employer provided
healthcare programs. The report reads, do they not understand, like
how businesses work? If you impose on employers a greater
employer contribution for their employees signing up for med account,

(13:27):
It's not like they'll just say, oh, okay, we'll just
take that cost. The cost will be passed on. It
will either be passed on in the form of increasing
prices for their services or goods that they sell, or
firing employees. Do they not ever think like any level

(13:55):
of second order thinking that these people do. No. Now,
when we return, we'll get to the heart of why
the legislature is rejecting all these cuts that Governor Newsom
has proposed, and the reason why it is quite simple.

(14:15):
State public employee unions, which run Sacramento. That's next on
the John Druardy Show. There's one insight that once you
learn it, it completely. It's the key to unlocking any
kind of authentic understanding of what goes on in Sacramento,

(14:36):
how Sacramento, how California state politics work. Once you understand this,
it's like you've put on the right prescription of glasses
and everything is clear to you. I remember John Fleischman,
who used to work for Andrew Breitbart. Heard he's a
great chronicler of California politics. I got to hear him

(14:57):
speak once in Orange County and he sort of laid
this out in short, state politics in California is not
run by dope smoking hippie liberals. It's not run by
AOC socialist liberals. State politics in California is quite simply

(15:22):
run by state public employee unions. That's who runs California.
California politics. The democratic politics of California is from beginning
to end, union politics. And once you understand that, it

(15:45):
helps you to understand a lot of things, pretty much
everything in California politics, from the control that the teachers
unions exercise, the way that California public schools stink and
are basically unreformable so many respects. Public employee unions dominate

(16:08):
California politics, a lot of rules in California. For why
does it take so long to build anything in California?
Unions unions dominating things and creating rules in ways that
are financially advantageous to them. Why does it take You know,
it's sort of a combo of unions and environmentalists, but unions,
especially public sector unions, dominate California politics. In fact, unions

(16:34):
so dominate politics that at a certain point they've cut
out the middleman. It's no longer just a thing of
we're at local union, we endorse this candidate, we get
this candidate money and voters and organization for their political campaign,
and then that person gets elected and does what we want. No,

(16:55):
they've cut out the middlemen. Instead, what labor unions have
started doing is just direct actually running labor union officials,
labor union local organizational heads for public office. All right.
Lorena Gonzales a classic example of this. Lorena Gonzales was
a big time labor union executive in San Diego. She

(17:18):
runs for the California State Assembly. She serves in the
State Assembly for twelve years, including as maybe the second
most powerful person in the State Assembly as the head
of the Assembly Appropriations Committee. This is the committee where
she gave the thumbs up her thumbs down for any
bill that spent money. Any bill that spent money in

(17:39):
California had to flow through her committee for her up
or down. Okay, so this is one of the most
powerful women in Sacramento. Serve for twelve years in state Assembly.
When she was term limited out, she went right back
to working for another labor union or maybe the same
labor I went right back to a big time labor
union executive job. That's what I'm talking about. The labor

(18:03):
unions control everything. So that is at the core of
why the legislature is upset with Governor Newsom's proposed cuts
limitations to the state budget. They don't like it because
organized labor doesn't like it. Newsom has to cut things.

(18:27):
He's cut spending for state universities. Public sector unions don't
like that because a lot of every CSU and UC
employee is a state worker, and probably many of them,
most of them are represented by public sector unions like SEIU.

(18:53):
Freezes on raises for local government workers, again hugely ticks
off public sector unions. So those are the first two
things that they roll back. Here's the craziest thing that
they're rolling back to show you just how bought and
sold the state legislature. So Newsom had a proposal to

(19:18):
eliminate temporarily or basically not to eliminate, just not to
fill six thousand positions in California state government that are
currently vacant. So there are about six thousand jobs in
the whole apparatus of California state government that are currently vacant.
Newsom's budget proposal was to leave those jobs vacant until

(19:44):
next year. Let lawmakers study the impact of those costs
of those cuts on the state's ability to monitor public
health and environmental protection, and then see if we want
to keep those cuts. But so are these are vacant jobs.

(20:04):
You don't have to even fire anybody. The idea is
just don't hire people into those vacant jobs for a year,
see if we even miss these people, and then decide
what you want to do permanently. I think that's a
brilliant idea on Governor Newsom's part. I applaud him for it.
But you know who would hate an idea like that

(20:26):
public sector unions. Why, because public sector unions do not
give a rats rear end about the state having a
budget deficit. They don't care. It's like in the movie Departed,
Oh you're sick, pay me, he had a bad week.
Pay me, pay me, pay me. That's what That's what

(20:49):
public sector unions want. They just want to get paid.
Unions only exist for one thing, as a knife exists
to who cut the tellos. The end goal of a
union is nothing more and nothing less than getting more

(21:10):
members who receive more money working for fewer hours. That's it.
That's their goal, under better conditions, with better bennies. That's it.
There's no other point to a labor union. They want
more members. They want more union jobs, so that means

(21:33):
more members to them. They want their members to make
more money, to have better benefits, less hours, better working conditions,
more perks. That's the point of a labor union. That's
the only point of a labor union. A teachers' union,
that's the only point of a teacher's union. The point
of a teacher's union is not to teach. That's a
teacher's job. The union's job is to get more jobs

(21:55):
in schools so that more teachers union members get hired
and have those teacher union members get paid more with
more benefits, working fewer hours. That is the point of
a union. So the State sen and the State Assembly
their response to Governor Newsom's proposed budget. Here's Newsom saying, Okay,

(22:19):
we have six thousand vacant positions. Let's just not fill
them for a year. See if we actually miss anyone
in those jobs, and then decide if we want to
hire them or not. That could save us alone. Like
one we did that before. It saved us like one
point two billion dollars. Let's just do it again. No,

(22:40):
the State Assembly and the State Senate their proposed budget
does not include that provision because they don't actually care
about the budget. They just want more union workers. The
state legislature is bought and sold by the public sector

(23:01):
unions in California. That's it. When we return thoughts on
Roman history and thoughts on the La riots, and thoughts
on Donald Trump's ability and authority to stop them with
the military, and Newsom's desire to stop Trump from stopping
it with the military. That is next on the John

(23:22):
Groarty Show. The legal case for whether President Trump has
the authority to send in troops armed forces to stop
the riots in Los Angeles is pretty clear cut. Trump
invoked Section one two four h six of the Armed

(23:43):
Forces Laws, and reading from a piece written by Anny
McCarthy from National Review, is a really good legal analyst
for them, which authorizes the president to call state national
guard forces into federal service whenever there is a rebellion
or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the
United States government, or when such unrest prevents the execution
of federal law by regular law enforcement agencies. So federal

(24:09):
law is pretty well grounded that Trump has the ability
to do this. There is dispute. Gavin Newsom is trying
to dispute whether California can call California, whether Trump can
use California National Guard personnel, and that makes me really

(24:36):
nervous about the idea of a legal challenge to that
legal challenge. That's a rising to the level of the
president's authority to tell the military what to do. That's
when we are that's when we're getting dicey, and that's
what's sort of making me think of the Roman Republic,
and it's making me think of Julius Caesar and Cato

(24:59):
the younger. Now let's talk about Julius Caesar and Cato
the younger. Julius Caesar was a very vigorous and enterprising
Roman politician. He wanted to do a number of big

(25:23):
time reforms, land reforms. Basically, Rome was in a bad
state in the sixties and fifties. The Senate was completely
out of touch with the needs of the Roman the
greater Italian countryside, especially with the needs of individual Roman citizens,

(25:47):
the needs of individual peoples whom they governed all over
the Mediterranean world. Totally disconnected. Policy was being made in Rome,
set in Rome, advocated for, and more critically being blocked
in Rome on the basis of individual senators vying for
political power, money, and prestige. Basically these Roman concepts of

(26:19):
dignitas and elctitas. It was sort of a zero sum game.
If you got glory, pristine glory, esteem, praise, then someone
else did not. It's a zero sum game. And so

(26:39):
if also if you passed legislation that helped a big
group of people, that big group of people would become
your clients. In Rome, there was this whole system of
clients and patrons. Cliontella was the name of it, where
it was basically these sort of vertical ways of in

(27:00):
which Romans could connect that crossed sort of social and
economic boundaries. If you were the senator that introduced and
pushed legislation to say, you know, break up massive estates
owned by super wealthy people who owned way more property
than was legally permitted to them to distribute to the

(27:22):
Italian countryside, or you voted for the enfranchisement giving Roman
citizenship to various Italians throughout the countryside, then all those
people whom you benefited would become your clients and they
would help you out. They would vote for you in elections,
they would back you in various ways, and your political

(27:43):
opponents could see that you would benefit in that way,
and they would try to stop you from passing things.
So Julius Caesar, I think, was genuinely trying to help
resolve some of these problems, and he had no greater
foe than Cato the younger. Cato the Younger was an

(28:04):
interesting guy. He came from a very prestigious noble family.
But at sort of the height of his influence in
the fifties is Julius Caesar's chief fifties BC is Julius
Caesar's chief political foe. He was a young guy, a
backbench He hadn't really helped too many prominent offices, but
he really sort of presented himself as like, i am

(28:27):
the upholder of conservatism, I'm the upholder of the traditional
Roman ways of doing things, and I'm not like this
rabble rouser Julius Caesar. And he would prevent Julius Caesar
from getting legislation passed, legislation that would actually have helped
in the Italian countryside. The Italian countryside was in a

(28:48):
really bad way. There were desperadoes all over the place
looking to waylay travelers. You constantly had weird disaffected senators
who would vie for power, not be able to get power,
and then turned to disaffected impoverished. You know, the farmers
whose farms had gone astray. You know, the soldiers who

(29:11):
had been finding on campaign and their houses had been seized, well,
they their their lands had not been taken care of
while they were away. Basically, you had disaffected people all
over Italy. So you know, you had one particular example
of this Catalan who was this very prominent Roman senator

(29:33):
who had looked missed out on opportunities to get elected consul.
He was really angry. He led try to start a
violent revolt against the Roman state. And Cicero, Marcus Tolio Cicero,
the great Roman writer in orater, made himself famous by
denouncing Catalan to his face in the Senate and the

(29:56):
Catalinarian conspiracy was crushed. That was in the sixties. So
you had these huge, real serious problems throughout Italy and
Julius Caesar was actually trying to address it, and Cato
the Younger, because he didn't want Julius Caesar to grow
in power, would block it and block and block it,

(30:18):
including through He was the original filibuster. He was one
of the first people to actually ever filibuster. Basically, the
Roman Senate they had to conclude their business by sundown.
And Cato the Younger, I guess, was such a great
orator that he just you know, Julius Caesar, who had

(30:41):
was elected consul at least once or twice during the fifties.
Julius Caesar would come forward with a proposal and Cato
the Younger would just talk it to death. He would
just talk and talk and talk, talk, talk to talk
and talk until sundown, and then Julius Caesar couldn't pass
his thing, and Caesar at one point, i think even
forcibly removed Cato from the Senate Chamber, which caused him

(31:04):
problems later on down the road because Kato's oh look
what he did to me is it's violent overthrow of
the state. I feel like there are all kinds of
parallels between the last century of the Roman Republic and
what we're seeing right now, where political violence is just

(31:28):
being normalized by one side and poo poo downplayed by
the media. I mean, let me just say that. I'll
say it for about the eight hundred billionth time, the
riot that happened on January sixth was bad, and large

(31:51):
swaths of the right agrees with that that it was
not a good thing. It's very hard to find quote
large swaths of the left calling the riots in La bad.
It seems like John Fetterman is like the one senator
who's like, very clearly, this is terrible, this needs to stop.

(32:15):
And this is you know, between the George Floyd riots
of twenty twenty and now, I guess this is just
a thing. Every time Trump is in office, we're going
to have violent riots. And this is what frustrates me.
People died during the Black Lives Matter George Floyd riots
in twenty twenty. People were killed murdered during those riots.

(32:41):
There was a former police chief in Saint Louis who
was murdered during the BLM riots that took place in
Saint Louis. Other kinds of violent crime started up after
those riots. The only person killed during the January sixth, right,
there were some people who have heart attacks, not from

(33:04):
you know, direct response to any injuries or anything like that,
and that that's been a thing. No one can actually
make a clear causal connection that anything any of the
January sixth riders did resulted in a death. The only
person who did die was Ashley Babbitt, who was killed
by a Capitol police officer. You know, people died during
the George Floyd riots, and here we have these riots

(33:25):
happening in Los Angeles and it's as bad as anything
that happened on January sixth. I would say as far
as actual destruction, actual inconvenience to people, actual fear, it
must be putting into people. I mean, you look at
these videos of cars burning and it makes me think, well,

(33:51):
I guess I'm not going to be overly concerning. I'm
not gonna worry as much about my carbon footprint when
you know, one liberal protester with a couple of miletov
cocktail is going to destroy three or four cars and
they're just gonna billow smokeout. So no, I'm these are

(34:11):
really really bad, and it's just becoming kind of normal
now that this is just what Democrats do. This is
just what the left does when a Republican is in
office and we don't like what he's doing, and specifically
having Ice deport people who aren't in the country legally.

(34:36):
There's no real political argument other than and we've also
sort of seen over the last couple months. If you
deport someone who's in the country illegally and he has
family here, you've engaged in family separation. If you deport

(34:57):
someone who's in the country illegally with his children and
the children were born in America, then you're deporting American citizens. Well,
what do you want? Do you want to separate the
families or not? Presumably if it's a child of illegal aliens,
we don't want to separate the child from illegal aliens
and they stay with his parents, So what they actually

(35:19):
want is just don't enforce the law. That is the desire.
Don't enforce the law, ignore these laws that we have
against illegal immigration, that there's actually no solution that will
make these people happy. And the idea was like, it's horrible,
ice went to a home depot to enforce Okay, why

(35:42):
is that worse? Is that worse than arresting people at
their home? Is that particularly bad? What the objection ultimately
just boils down to, we don't want to enforce the law.
And again, I feel like it's a thing of in
Wa Washington, as in Rome, we had. Rome had massive

(36:05):
problems with disaffected people in the countryside, disaffected ways in
which land had been seized and controlled overwhelmingly by rich shareholders.
The poor people basically had no land left to farm.
They were disaffected, ready to jump at any revolutionary thing.
In America, we have this uncontrolled immigration crisis under President Biden.

(36:28):
Congress cannot pass a law to normalize our regulations, our
immigration situation because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on anything.
They cannot even come up with a compromise thing because
they don't want to give a victory to the other
side or to the other side's president. Here comes someone
wanting to vigorously enforce law to fix the problem, Donald Trump,

(36:50):
and he's met with Cato, the Youngers, with federal judges
on sometimes legitimate grounds, sometimes quite specious grounds, trying to
stop often quite specious grounds, stopping every single thing he's
trying to do. When we return, what could be the
next constitutional crisis next on the John Girardi Show. The

(37:15):
next constitutional crisis, as far as I can see, it
is if California gets a federal judge to say that
Donald Trump can't tell the California National Guard to put
down a riot that's happening in Los Angeles, a riot
that's being brought about by protesters trying to stop a

(37:38):
federal government agency from enforcing the law. Now, maybe you
try to argue, there's some argument that against federalizing National
Guard troops. What these guys are tied to the US military.
This is the president ordering the military what to do.
This is getting to a core presidential function. If a
court tells the president that he can't do stuff with

(38:01):
his own military, when he's the commander in chief of
the military that's approaching constitutional crisis levels, that'll do it.
John dis already show see you next time on Power
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