Gavin Newsom paddles to the political right with 3 notable vetoes

Nearly a half-century ago, while addressing a group of high school students, Jerry Brown enunciated his canoe theory of governance.

“The way you have to approach the political process is something like piloting a canoe,” Brown said in 1979, referring to his often abrupt changes of policy. “If you stand up on one side you’ll fall in. If you stand up on the other side you’ll fall in. But if you paddle a little bit on the left side, then paddle a little bit on the right side, you keep going right down the middle.”

Gavin Newsom — Brown’s quasi-nephew by dint of the eight decades their two families have been intertwined — seems to be emulating that theory as, for the final time, he weighs bills passed by the Legislature.

Newsom has often described himself as progressive, but he won praise from the right after vetoing three bills over the weekend that had been backed by unions or environmental groups.

The most prominent of the three, Assembly Bill 1383, would have partially undone one of Brown’s major accomplishments after returning to the governorship in 2011: An overhaul of how pensions are calculated for state and local government employees.

At the time, local governments were complaining that mandatory payments to the California Public Employees Retirement System were undermining vital services. Brown’s reform, known as PEPRA, maintained benefits for current workers and retirees but reduced them for future hires and made employees shoulder a larger share of the financial burden.

AB 1383, sponsored by a raft of public employee unions, would have enhanced those benefits and lowered the retirement age for public safety workers from 57 to 55. The bill won nearly unanimous approval in the Legislature, but Newsom rejected it, saying it would cost too much.

“I still recall — before PEPRA’s passage in 2012 — the alarming forecasts, the fierce criticism of public employees, and the growing pressure to eliminate defined benefit plans all together,” he said. “This is an era of California history I do not wish to repeat.”

The coalition of local governments opposing the bill praised the veto, saying the bill would have added billions in new costs and liabilities “over the next few decades.”

Conservative blogger Jon Fleischman, who had predicted that Newsom would sign the bill, apologized in print. “My prediction was wrong. Completely wrong,” he wrote. “My apologies to the governor, though I think my prediction was defensible.”

Newsom also rejected another union-backed bill aimed at making it easier for state employees to work from home. Although he had sanctioned remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, Newsom has since cracked down, ordering state employees to work in their offices at least four days a week, with some exceptions.

Had he signed Assembly Bill 1729, it would have required state agencies to justify denying telework to their employees. But Newsom said he “fundamentally” believes in-person work is more effective, and “this measure, by limiting departmental flexibility and encouraging telework to be the default work arrangement, takes the state’s telework policy in the wrong direction.”

Newsom continued to paddle his political canoe to the right by vetoing a measure that would have reinstated some of the California Environmental Quality Act regulation that he and the Legislature had streamlined last year, rejecting environmentalists’ contentions that the 2025 overhaul went too far.

In his veto message of Senate Bill 954, Newsom called the 2025 action “a long-overdue overhaul to get California building again,” adding, “If implementation reveals problems, they should be addressed through targeted, evidence-based changes — not by preemptively rolling back our progress.”

The California Manufacturers & Technology Association and other business groups cheered the veto, while Elizabeth Reid-Wainscoat at the Center for Biological Diversity said Newsom “shirked his responsibility to protect Californians and our state’s natural heritage.”

These vetoes may reflect Newsom’s beliefs, but they also may moderate his left-of-center image as he prepares for a likely presidential campaign in states that are not nearly as progressive as California.