By Assemblyman Kevin Kiley – September 6, 2022
Over the weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle’s California politics reporter was asked to name the “biggest loser” at the Capitol this year. His answer: the Vaccine Work Group.
When the group’s radical bills were first released, insiders said they would all sail through. Here is the final scorecard for the worst bills:
- SB 871 – universal school vaccine mandate. DEFEATED
- AB 1993 – universal worker vaccine mandate. DEFEATED
- AB 455 – universal vaccine passport. DEFEATED
- SB 1464 – coerced police enforcement of mandates. DEFEATED
- SB 866 – removal of parent vaccine consent. DEFEATED
Granted, two awful bills did pass. AB 2098 would censor doctors and SB 1479 would make schools do onerous COVID testing. You can still tell Newsom to veto them.
Notably, the Chronicle reporter attributed the Vaccine Work Group’s failure to “opposition from people in all walks of life.” In other words, the biggest winner was you: the California citizen.
More than that, it was the very concept of representative government. That’s what Gallagher and I sought to defend when we sued Newsom in June of 2020; it was the entire topic of my opening statement at our trial.
We won that trial in what should have marked the end of one-man rule. Of course, Newsom then got the Chief Appellate Justice to step in and save him – a Justice who has since been removed from the bench by the Commission on Judicial Performance.
But the premise of our case has now been vindicated. While Newsom imposed countless mandates by fiat, not a single one passed when subjected to the legislative process. This is exactly why our Founders rejected autocracy in favor of a separation of powers.
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