newsom had a bill that would stop california handing trans care doctors to other states. he vetoed it so the next governor gets to decide.
via the San Francisco Chronicle and The Advocate, with the vote record from California Legislative Information and the statements from Reproductive Freedom for All.
Gavin Newsom has taken a principled stand on behalf of someone who has not been elected yet.
On Sunday, September 20, the governor vetoed Assembly Bill 2164. The bill, by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Democrat from Orinda, would have barred California's governor from honoring another state's request to extradite someone for providing legally protected abortion care or gender-affirming care here. It was not a squeaker. The Assembly passed it 57 to 14 in May and the Senate 29 to 9 in August, according to the Legislature's own record.
what the veto message says
Newsom's stated objection was not to the policy. It was to who gets to hold the pen. He called extradition an "exclusively executive function," and then wrote the sentence that is the whole story:
"I am troubled by the precedent that would be set if an outgoing administration agreed with the Legislature to erode the executive authority of an incoming Governor based on their shared policy preferences, regardless of how righteous and well-intended those actions may be."
Translated out of veto-message: he is not calling the idea wrong, he just does not want to tie the hands of whoever comes next. Newsom is, by his own description, the outgoing administration. As the Chronicle laid out, the bill would essentially have written into law his own 2022 executive order refusing to extradite abortion providers, which a future governor can simply rescind. He has used that power himself; in January, per the Chronicle, he refused Louisiana's attempt to extradite a Bay Area doctor indicted for allegedly mailing abortion pills there. So the precedent being protected is the right of a stranger to do the thing Newsom has already refused to do.
who the next governor might be
This is where the principle gets expensive. The Chronicle reports that Xavier Becerra, the Democrat favored to win in November, has said he would not extradite that doctor. Steve Hilton, the Republican, first hedged and then said in July that he would not either. Reproductive Freedom for All is not reassured. "Steve Hilton has made it very clear that he is willing to send California abortion providers to other states to face criminal charges," its CEO Mini Timmaraju said Monday, warning that providers are now "one election away from extradition."
Note what every one of those promises is about. The Louisiana doctor. Abortion pills. None of the coverage we read records either candidate being asked what he would do with a request to extradite a doctor who prescribed puberty blockers to a kid from Texas.
the half nobody is leading with
AB 2164 was two bills stapled together, and the rebukes all came for the first one. The Guttmacher Institute called the veto "disappointing" in a statement about abortion pills. Reproductive Freedom for All said it was "deeply disappointed" that protections "for abortion providers" were left "in the hands of whoever occupies the governor's office." The Chronicle's own headline says abortion. The gender-affirming care protections, which is to say the part protecting the kind of care hospitals are currently paying the federal government to stop providing, got a clause.
That is not a complaint about the abortion groups, who sponsored and fought for the thing. It is a note on the order of operations. When the protection goes, the cause people put in the press release is the one that polls. We have watched institutions sign away trans care for surprisingly little money all year. California just declined to write down that it would not do the same, and it did so to be polite to the next guy.
