The Assembly as the setting for the recall effort
The California State Assembly appears in these excerpts chiefly as the office held by Kevin Kiley, the guest on a single episode devoted to the movement to recall Governor Gavin Newsom. Bob Zadek introduces Kiley as a member of the California State Assembly representing the 6th election district, elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2018, and later describes him as a second-termer and a Republican who did not have a whole lot of friends as he looked to his left and looked to his right in the chamber, not yet in the leadership of the house The Case for Recalling Gavin Newsom (2021).
Kiley’s own account places the Assembly member at some distance from the recall’s origins. Asked how he became involved, he says he was not the person who started the recall and was not involved in its early stages, which he attributes to ordinary citizens and to the people of California. He describes a citizens’ movement that sprang up and gained momentum in response to Gavin Newsom’s abuses of power during the COVID-19 era, and says that when he decided to get involved it was to contribute what he could to that movement and to lend his voice to it. He contrasts the campaign’s ordinary-people leadership with politicians like himself, and argues that the movement grew out of a longer trend in which government had become more and more centralized and more power had been taken away from citizens and local communities.
The recall’s progress as the Assembly member describes it
The episode’s discussion of the recall’s mechanics is Kiley’s, delivered in response to Bob Zadek’s request for the procedural status and a quick summary of coming events. Kiley says the deadline to gather signatures had passed, that the campaign had gathered in excess of 2.1 million, that already 1.2 million or so had been verified, and that given the rate of validity the recall would all but certainly qualify; the number of verified signatures required, he says, is 1.5 million. He predicts an official announcement sometime in late April that the recall election is on, and says the ultimate election is likely to take place later in the year, perhaps in the fall or even November.
Kiley also attributes delay to the legislature as an institution rather than to the Assembly alone. He says the legislature had conspired to drag out the process of a recall, having passed a bill a few years earlier to stretch it out, and that it should have happened a lot quicker, as it did during the 2003 recall. Bob Zadek’s introduction supplies the 2003 precedent in fuller form: Gray Davis was kicked out and replaced by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about a decade earlier, and California has shown itself willing to relegate governors to being recalled and fired.
The argument the recall carried
The theme Bob Zadek draws out of Kiley’s book is that Gavin Newsom’s actions rested on the assumption that ordinary citizens are incapable of making the important decisions about their own lives, and that California needed what Zadek calls 35 million conservators for its citizens. He cites driving for Uber, wearing or not wearing a mask, going to a restaurant or not and going to a gym or not as examples, and says the recall’s common message is a request that Newsom butt out and let people run their lives — a request Zadek calls personal and intimate rather than Democratic or Republican or ideological.
Kiley agrees and supplies the episode’s most general statement about the stakes. He says that when Gavin Newsom was trying to control our lives by fiat it was a double blow to freedom: a violation of personal liberty as individuals to order our lives as we see fit, and at the same time a blow to collective freedom as self-governing communities and to the ability of citizens to participate in their own government and direct their own political destiny. He ties that second sense to the founders’ idea of personal freedom and to a notion of self-government that he says had been eroded for a long time and had totally collapsed in the preceding year. With the recall and the ouster of Newsom, which he hoped would occur later that year, Kiley says he hoped for a revival of freedom in both senses.
Bob Zadek’s introduction frames the episode as part of a broader moment, placing Governor Cuomo in New York staring down the barrel of an impeachment alongside former President Trump’s impeachments and the Newsom recall, and noting that California is often the first in the nation for stuff, good and bad. He asks what is special about Gavin Newsom that justifies his being recalled as opposed to simply letting the voters decide at the next election, and says the story gives faith that grassroots movements can succeed if they have the right leadership and the right goal. What the excerpts record of the recall’s origins is a citizens’ movement, with the Assembly member joining rather than leading it.
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, The Case for Recalling Gavin Newsom, touches the California State Assembly, so the excerpts show no development in the treatment of the topic across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the Assembly’s composition, districts, leadership, committees, rules, budget or legislative process, and they name no bill the Assembly passed except the measure Kiley attributes to the legislature for stretching out recalls. They state no founding date or constitutional basis for the body, and they do not say what became of the recall election Kiley anticipated or how the Assembly featured in it. Bob Zadek’s closing remarks describe Kiley as having a future in California or national politics, but the excerpts carry no further information about his career or his district beyond what he and Zadek say here.