After four years of being the relentless target of a Republican president who worked overtime to fatten, punish and marginalize California and all it stands for, the state is suddenly back at center stage in Washington’s political arena.
California is emerging as the de facto group of policy experts for the Biden-Harris administration and a Congress soon to be under Democratic control. That’s rekindling the clichés of the past about the state: incubator of innovation, main laboratory of democracy, land of great ideas, even as it battles the increasing infections of COVID-19, a safety net worn down by the toll of the pandemic, crushing housing costs and wildfires, all fueling an exodus of residents.
There is no place the incoming administration leans more for inspiration to set a progressive political agenda.
The resurgence in Washington of the California governance model was cemented by the recent recovery of the Senate majority by Democrats, and comes after a Trump-era hiatus during which the state was testing ambitious new policies. Another factor: California Sen. Kamala Harris is about to become vice president.
“California has never had a Democrat on a national ballot, much less a ballot they won,” said former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. “Kamala Harris will be at all the meetings and will have the last word with the president after they are over. She will share ideas, innovations and advances from California that could help solve problems nationwide.
Other Californians will do the same from Biden’s cabinet. Atty. General Xavier Becerra is nominated to head the huge Department of Health and Human Services. The nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, is a professor at UC Berkeley, as is the nominee for Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. Alejandro Mayorkas, a longtime California resident, is the nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security.
And in Congress, of course, San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi will be high on California’s agenda as Speaker of the House.
Not that Biden needs a push. He has been pushing to nationalize some of the state’s pioneering efforts in climate action, worker rights, law enforcement and criminal justice, healthcare, and economic empowerment since he was vice president in the Obama era. He continued to champion the cause while he and Harris were still rivals in the 2020 presidential race.
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The incoming administration is embracing some of California’s most pioneering initiatives, such as programs to rapidly decarbonize the power grid and free college, as well as more obscure incremental policies. Also on the new White House agenda will be measures to ban mandatory arbitration clauses in employee contracts and the reactivation of the “Cash for Junk” program aimed at providing incentives to get polluting cars off the road, distinctive policies Of California.
Even some ideas that haven’t worked as well in California are now on the national agenda. Biden is a fervent supporter of the high-speed rail, as well as the new protections for workers in the gig economy that California voters watered down in November.
“California has this mantle of leadership, but along with that can come the setbacks of being a first adopter,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael). “It is an innovative and imaginative place that tends to set trends and mark trails. It is too big and too influential not to inform the direction of our country’s politics in the future.
California’s influence will be felt in how Americans fuel their homes and cars, and even how they save for retirement.
«California is not just about going further, it’s about breaking it down, ”said former State Senate Leader Kevin de León, who helped the state implement some of the innovative ideas that the incoming administration wants to pursue. “The state is full of disruptors and discontents who are impatient and have no problem challenging the status quo.”
De León worked for years to enroll all California workers in an “auto-IRA” program that would automatically direct a small portion of their earnings to a 401 (k) style savings account. He was motivated by the experience of his aunt, a housekeeper, and one of the millions of Californians who worked a low-wage job with no retirement safety net beyond Social Security.
“This was a woman, salt of the earth, who always worked with her fingers to the bone,” said De León. “However, I am your IRA, I am your pension plan. His story is not unique. There are millions of Californians and tens of millions of Americans who are retiring in poverty. The CalSavers program that De León was able to help create in California is a model for Biden’s retirement security agenda.
California’s plan to phase out carbon-emitting power sources from its power grid entirely by 2045 also inspired the incoming administration. Biden proposes an even more aggressive timeline, seeking to move the grid to zero emissions across the country by 2035.
The state’s plan was the most ambitious of its kind when it was approved in 2018, a snub to Trump’s relentless drive to revive demand for fossil fuels. It moved several other states to push their decarbonization schedules. “My thinking was that we had to be a beacon of hope and opportunity as Trump tried to undo all of our policies at the national level,” De León said.
When Trump moved to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, California pledged to meet its goals independently and launched a successful crusade to persuade 23 other states to do the same. Biden is now preparing to re-enter the deal. California’s tailpipe emissions standards that the Trump administration worked furiously to erode are again critical to that effort, helping propel the nation’s vehicle fleet toward electrification.
An environmental task force created last year with members across the Democratic Party spectrum, co-chaired by former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, since he was appointed to Biden’s Cabinet as a climate envoy, urged the incoming administration to seek advice. in California. “Immediately summon California, due to its unique authority, and other states with labor, automotive and environmental leaders to inform ambitious actions,” advises the group’s report.
Biden’s schedule will also be informed by the California setbacks.
The ongoing blackouts the state recently suffered signaled the need for more innovation, public investment and oversight to keep up with green energy goals. The state’s cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gases failed to curb pollution in underserved communities, sparking protests that may have cost California’s top air regulator a position in Biden’s cabinet as head of the Environmental protection agency.
Likewise, disastrous delays in the delivery of unemployment assistance checks during the pandemic and the rampant levels of fraud associated with it, spoiled the prospects of the California Secretary of Labor’s Cabinet. (Biden chose a state government official, Isabel Guzmán, to head the Small Business Administration.)
The national movement to protect workers in the gig economy took a damaging blow when California voters in November sided with ride-sharing companies and other tech companies, who were eager to open large loopholes in the historic law. designed to protect those workers.
Supporters of the policies say the setbacks in California are part of the road tests. They tell federal leaders what adjustments are needed before a national launch.
A California policy that Biden promises to replicate aims to reduce the high rate of black women who die in childbirth or within a year. Although the program helped the state make significant progress in reducing the overall maternal mortality rate, it did not reduce the racial gap. Black women still account for 40% of deaths. The Biden camp says it will propose additional actions to address racial inequalities in health care.
In the case of the contract worker rules that California created, and that Biden favors, activists in the state hope that the president-elect will revive protections like those undermined by Proposition 22. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, it said in a statement. email that Biden could potentially pre-empt the California industry-backed initiative with federal action, a move he said would be “critically important.”
It is unknown if Biden will make it that far. Either way, the incoming administration has made clear that it is looking to California as it moves forward to reform labor rules. The state has “the most important set of laws in the nation to protect workers,” Reich wrote. Those laws, he said, give employees more rights than anywhere else in the country on issues including overtime, employer retaliation, wage theft, discrimination and protection against sexual harassment.
“We’ve shown that you can have progressive policies and enjoy economic growth,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley Democrat.
Khanna recently touted those policies in a podcast hosted by progressive filmmaker Michael Moore. The title of the episode was notable considering that Moore attacked the Bay Area in his 1989 film “Roger and Me” as a hornet’s nest of self-indulgent liberals.
He called last month’s show “Make America California Again!”
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