Latest news with #CaliforniaLaborFederation
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chabria: Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump have a lot in common. California should pay attention
Zohran Mamdani is a stylish, millennial, African-born Muslim with a Hollywood pedigree who just won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayor's race. If he sounds like Donald Trump's worst nightmare, he just might be. But he's also a lot like him. They're both charismatic leaders who have bucked their parties, tapped into the current political ethos that eschews traditional loyalties and by doing so, made themselves popular enough with fed-up voters to win elections when — to many in the political elite — they seem exactly like the kind of candidate who shouldn't be able to get their grandmother's vote. "Working-class people want somebody who really takes on the status quo, who pushes an economic populist agenda and convinces them that something's going to change," Lorena Gonzalez told me. She's the head of the California Labor Federation, which represents unions, and even she's fed up with Democrats. "There are days that I'm like, why am I still in this party?" she said. "When I see them cozy up to tech, when I see this abundance issue that streamlines worker protections, when I see this fascination with billionaires and this acquiescing to not taxing billionaires and not doing anything about rent control, you know, there's a point where I'm like, come on, grow some balls, go decide who you're for." Or, as Trump put it in a social media post after Mamdani's win, "Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!" Read more: Chabria: How conflict with Iran could supercharge Trump's domestic agenda Trump is right, words that I don't often say — Mamdani's victory may signal something deeper than a lone mayor's race on the East Coast. People — both on the left and the right — crave authenticity, and want someone to believe in, be it an orange-hued boomer or a brown-skinned hipster. The Democrats, as political strategist Mike Madrid put it, are having their own Tea Party moment, when populist anger eats the old guard, as it did beginning in 2007 when the far-right of the Republican party began its now-successful takeover. Trump was never the impetus of the party's swing to the fringe, he just capitalized on it. "This is just a populist revolt of the Democratic Party against the establishment base," Madrid said. There's been ad nauseam amounts of pontificating about the current state of the Democratic party. Should it go more centrist? Should it embrace the progressive end? But the truth is the voters have already decided. They do indeed want lower grocery prices, as Trump promised but failed to deliver. But they also want democracy to not crumble. And they want to buy a house, and maybe not have their neighbors deported. But really, in that order. And they don't trust many, if not most, of the current Democrats in office to deliver. Like Republicans before them, they want outsiders (Mamdani, 33, is serving in the state Assembly), or at least someone who can sound like one. Gonzalez spends a lot of time talking to voters and she said left and right, Democrat and Republican, they see few differences remaining between the two parties, and are tired of voting for career politicians who haven't delivered on economic issues. Mamdani, whose mother is the film director Mira Nair (and who once rapped under the name Young Cardamom), campaigned on "a New York you can afford." That included freezing payments on rent-controlled apartments, building new affordable housing with union labor, making both transit and child care free and — you guessed it — cheaper groceries. Whether he delivers or not, those were messages that a broad swath of New Yorkers, struggling like all of us with the cost of living, wanted to hear. And he delivered them not just with credibility, but with an entertainment value that nods to his mom's influence: hamming it up Bollywood style for the South Asian aunties, walking the length of Manhattan to talk with people, jumping in the Atlantic ocean in a suit with a skinny tie. Charisma and chutzpah. Which, of course, is how Trump made his own rise, promising, with showman verve, to be the voice of the toiling voiceless who increasingly are in danger of becoming the working poor. Yes, he is a con man who is clearly for the rich. But still, he knows how to deliver a line to his base: "They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs." That may be the biggest lesson for California, where we will soon be voting for a new governor from a crowded field — of establishment candidates. Even Kamala Harris, maybe especially Harris, fits that insider image, and certainly Gavin Newsom, despite zigzagging from centrist to pugilist, can't forward his presidential ambitions as anything but old-guard. "What makes someone like Zohran so compelling, is even if you don't agree with him on everything, which few voters do, you understand that he believes it and that you know where he's coming from," said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a PAC that recruits young progressives to run for office. "I think that's the distinction between him and say someone like Gavin Newsom, which is, like, does Gavin believe what he says? Does he buy his own bull—? It's sort of unclear," Litman added. The anger of voters is strikingly clear, though, especially for ones who have for so long been loyal to Democrats. A new Pew analysis out this week found that about 20% of the Republican base is now nonwhite, nearly doubling what it was in 2016. Republicans have made gains with Black voters, Asian voters and Trump drew nearly half of Latino voters. Ouch. "One of the real challenges for the Democrats is two central pieces of the orthodoxy has been that they are the party of the working class and that they are the party of nonwhite voters," Madrid said. "Both of those are increasingly proving untrue, and the question then becomes, well, how do you get them back? The way you get them back is by having some sort of economic populist policy framework." Read more: Chabria: The secret police are everywhere. Do they really need the masks? Litman said that the way to capture voters is by running new candidates, the kind who don't come with history — and baggage. In the 36 hours after Mamdani was elected, her organization had 1,100 people sign up to learn more about how to run for office themselves, she said. It's the biggest spike since the inauguration, and it shows that voters aren't disinterested in democracy, but alienated from the existing options. "The establishment is not unbeatable. They're only unchallenged," Litman said. "And I think the more that the Democratic Party establishment, as much as it exists, can understand that the people and the playbooks that got us here will not be the people and playbooks that get us out of it, the better off we'll be." So maybe there are more Mamdani's out there, waiting to lead the way. If Democrats are looking for advice, Trump may have offered the best I've seen in a while — highlighting the insider/outsider Democrats who have, like Mamdani, made their name by rattling the establishment. "I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into 'play,'" he wrote on social media. "After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the Greatest Losses in History, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Democrats should nominate Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President, and AOC+3 should be, respectively, Vice President, and three High Level Members of the Cabinet — Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani and our Country is really SCREWED!" Or not. Wouldn't that be a slate? Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
San Francisco Chronicle
18 hours ago
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
California budget comes down to the wire as Newsom, lawmakers face off over housing
SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers are scheduled to pass a budget that rolls back health care benefits for undocumented immigrants and makes other cuts, even as they continue to negotiate with Gov. Gavin Newsom over housing policies that have so far prevented them from reaching a final deal. The housing policies at issue would represent some of the most significant reforms to the state's landmark environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, since its inception. They would grant broad exemptions to CEQA for homes and other buildings in already developed areas. The lawmakers who crafted the original proposals argue that the law has been abused by people trying to block development and that building more homes in already densely populated areas where people live and work is good for the environment. Newsom agreed, and has made his signature on the budget contingent on lawmakers agreeing to enact some of the CEQA exemptions. But when the negotiated language was released earlier this week, it drew swift backlash, especially from labor unions. Lorena Gonzalez, who leads the California Labor Federation, criticized the proposal because she said it did not require high enough wages for construction workers who build the projects allowed under the bill. For years, bills meant to kickstart housing construction have been stymied by labor unions' insistence on provisions that would effectively require that new homes be built by union workers or ones paid what developers often describe as prohibitively high wages. The budget bill lawmakers plan to pass Friday contains a clause that would render it inoperative if lawmakers don't also approve much of the CEQA overhaul that Newsom has called for. The budget deal makes up for a projected $12 billion shortfall in part by taking out billions of dollars in loans and taking money from the state's reserves. It also partially scales back the state's health care coverage for undocumented people who make less than 138% of the federal poverty level. It will freeze enrollment for the program starting next year and will charge undocumented people ages 19-59 $30 per month in premiums starting in 2027. Growing health care costs, in addition to the economic toll from import taxes imposed by President Donald Trump, made the state's budget outlook particularly challenging this year. 'We had to make some very difficult decisions to balance this budget,' Erika Li, a top budget official for the Newsom administration, told lawmakers during a committee hearing earlier this week. Republicans criticized some of the borrowing and budgeting techniques Newsom and lawmakers used to balance the budget, arguing there should have been more cuts given the economic uncertainty in the years ahead. 'This budget that we see today, to the extent that I can understand it, still has a large dose of hope for a miracle, and it is seemingly less likely,' Sen. Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, said during the committee hearing. Cities and counties, meanwhile, have criticized the agreement for not providing more funding for reducing homelessness and implementing Proposition 36, which increased penalties for drug and theft crimes. The budget does include a $750 million loan for struggling Bay Area transit agencies and an expansion of the state's film tax credit program to $750 million to try to keep the industry in California.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump have a lot in common. California should pay attention
Zohran Mamdani is a stylish, millennial, African-born Muslim with a Hollywood pedigree who just won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayor's race. If he sounds like Donald Trump's worst nightmare, he just might be. But he's also a lot like him. They're both charismatic leaders who have bucked their parties, tapped into the current political ethos that eschews traditional loyalties and by doing so, made themselves popular enough with fed-up voters to win elections when — to many in the political elite — they seem exactly like the kind of candidate who shouldn't be able to get their grandmother's vote. 'Working-class people want somebody who really takes on the status quo, who pushes an economic populist agenda and convinces them that something's going to change,' Lorena Gonzalez told me. She's the head of the California Labor Federation, which represents unions, and even she's fed up with Democrats. 'There are days that I'm like, why am I still in this party?' she said. 'When I see them cozy up to tech, when I see this abundance issue that streamlines worker protections, when I see this fascination with billionaires and this acquiescing to not taxing billionaires and not doing anything about rent control, you know, there's a point where I'm like, come on, grow some balls, go decide who you're for.' Or, as Trump put it in a social media post after Mamdani's win, 'Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!' Trump is right, words that I don't often say — Mamdani's victory may signal something deeper than a lone mayor's race on the East Coast. People — both on the left and the right — crave authenticity, and want someone to believe in, be it an orange-hued boomer or a brown-skinned hipster. The Democrats, as political strategist Mike Madrid put it, are having their own Tea Party moment, when populist anger eats the old guard, as it did beginning in 2007 when the far-right of the Republican party began its now-successful takeover. Trump was never the impetus of the party's swing to the fringe, he just capitalized on it. 'This is just a populist revolt of the Democratic Party against the establishment base,' Madrid said. There's been ad nauseam amounts of pontificating about the current state of the Democratic party. Should it go more centrist? Should it embrace the progressive end? But the truth is the voters have already decided. They do indeed want lower grocery prices, as Trump promised but failed to deliver. But they also want democracy to not crumble. And they want to buy a house, and maybe not have their neighbors deported. But really, in that order. And they don't trust many, if not most, of the current Democrats in office to deliver. Like Republicans before them, they want outsiders (Mamdani, 33, is serving in the state Assembly), or at least someone who can sound like one. Gonzalez spends a lot of time talking to voters and she said left and right, Democrat and Republican, they see few differences remaining between the two parties, and are tired of voting for career politicians who haven't delivered on economic issues. Mamdani, whose mother is the film director Mira Nair (and who once rapped under the name Young Cardamom), campaigned on 'a New York you can afford.' That included freezing payments on rent-controlled apartments, building new affordable housing with union labor, making both transit and child care free and — you guessed it — cheaper groceries. Whether he delivers or not, those were messages that a broad swath of New Yorkers, struggling like all of us with the cost of living, wanted to hear. And he delivered them not just with credibility, but with an entertainment value that nods to his mom's influence: hamming it up Bollywood style for the South Asian aunties, walking the length of Manhattan to talk with people, jumping in the Atlantic ocean in a suit with a skinny tie. Charisma and chutzpah. Which, of course, is how Trump made his own rise, promising, with showman verve, to be the voice of the toiling voiceless who increasingly are in danger of becoming the working poor. Yes, he is a con man who is clearly for the rich. But still, he knows how to deliver a line to his base: 'They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs.' That may be the biggest lesson for California, where we will soon be voting for a new governor from a crowded field — of establishment candidates. Even Kamala Harris, maybe especially Harris, fits that insider image, and certainly Gavin Newsom, despite zigzagging from centrist to pugilist, can't forward his presidential ambitions as anything but old-guard. 'What makes someone like Zohran so compelling, is even if you don't agree with him on everything, which few voters do, you understand that he believes it and that you know where he's coming from,' said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a PAC that recruits young progressives to run for office. 'I think that's the distinction between him and say someone like Gavin Newsom, which is, like, does Gavin believe what he says? Does he buy his own bull—? It's sort of unclear,' Litman added. The anger of voters is strikingly clear, though, especially for ones who have for so long been loyal to Democrats. A new Pew analysis out this week found that about 20% of the Republican base is now nonwhite, nearly doubling what it was in 2016. Republicans have made gains with Black voters, Asian voters and Trump drew nearly half of Latino voters. Ouch. 'One of the real challenges for the Democrats is two central pieces of the orthodoxy has been that they are the party of the working class and that they are the party of nonwhite voters,' Madrid said. 'Both of those are increasingly proving untrue, and the question then becomes, well, how do you get them back? The way you get them back is by having some sort of economic populist policy framework.' Litman said that the way to capture voters is by running new candidates, the kind who don't come with history — and baggage. In the 36 hours after Mamdani was elected, her organization had 1,100 people sign up to learn more about how to run for office themselves, she said. It's the biggest spike since the inauguration, and it shows that voters aren't disinterested in democracy, but alienated from the existing options. 'The establishment is not unbeatable. They're only unchallenged,' Litman said. 'And I think the more that the Democratic Party establishment, as much as it exists, can understand that the people and the playbooks that got us here will not be the people and playbooks that get us out of it, the better off we'll be.' So maybe there are more Mamdani's out there, waiting to lead the way. If Democrats are looking for advice, Trump may have offered the best I've seen in a while — highlighting the insider/outsider Democrats who have, like Mamdani, made their name by rattling the establishment. 'I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into 'play,'' he wrote on social media. 'After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the Greatest Losses in History, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Democrats should nominate Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President, and AOC+3 should be, respectively, Vice President, and three High Level Members of the Cabinet — Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani and our Country is really SCREWED!' Or not. Wouldn't that be a slate?
Politico
2 days ago
- Business
- Politico
‘Abundance' movement hits a labor wall in California
SAN FRANCISCO — California's Year of Abundance just crashed into political reality. For months, Democrats here raved about an ascendant movement to supercharge housing and energy infrastructure, mainlining the buzzy Ezra Klein book, 'Abundance.' Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential presidential contender, and allies in the Legislature argued that an aggressively pro-building agenda could lift their moribund fortunes by addressing skyrocketing housing prices while proving they are the party of bold action. But now top Democrats are confronting opposition from unions wary that the rush to ease regulations could undercut hard-fought wage and training standards. The animosity spilled over this week, with proposed new wage minimums for fast-tracked housing projects spurring a backlash from unions and some Democratic legislators. 'Abundance' may be a wonky rallying cry for many California Democrats. But for some of their closest allies, it has become a slur. 'On one hand, we have Gavin trying to sit down with these right-wing podcasters to talk about losing young men, and on the other hand he's putting his name on some bill that reduces the wages of working-class men in California,' California Labor Federation leader Lorena Gonzalez. 'Anyone who thinks this abundance movement is how we're going to get our groove back just hasn't talked to real people.' Or as state Sen. Dave Cortese, a San Jose Democrat and a staunch labor ally, put it: 'I've been around long enough to know that some of this latest trendy stuff is bullshit.' Democrats focused on spurring housing development insist they are on labor's side. They've enlisted an influential ally in California's carpenters union, and argue that crushing housing costs — the result of decades of under-building — are burdening the very working men and women unions represent. Democrats still reeling from defeats in 2024 are desperate to win back working-class voters who have fled the party. 'No one wants to actually go against labor — and not because they're powerful, but because we stand with labor,' said Matt Lewis, communications director for California YIMBY, an influential pro-development advocacy group. 'We don't want to undermine labor. We want people to have good wages and be able to live in the homes we've built.' But many union officials are unpersuaded. They recoiled when journalist Josh Barro tolda gathering of centrist Democrats last month that when he examined policies that 'stand in the way of abundance,' he'd often 'find a labor union,' following up with a post entitled, 'In Blue Cities, Abundance Will Require Fighting Labor Unions.' Barro does not speak for the nebulous abundance movement. But the kind of sentiment he expressed does little to disabuse progressives and union members of their belief that it is a Trojan Horse for the kinds of big-donor-friendly policies that have unmoored Democrats from their onetime base. The wage proposal in Sacramento this week offered them more evidence. 'Folks who want to make dramatic changes to the system to benefit their agenda like to repackage them as the new shiny thing,' said Scott Wetch, a longtime labor lobbyist who on Wednesday likened the bill to Jim Crow-era efforts to suppress wages. Gretchen Newsom, a representative of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Democrats should focus on struggling working-class voters. 'Instead,' said Newsom, who is not related to the governor, 'we're doing this abundance theory that is abundantly going to abandon workers.' It's widely accepted among politicians of both parties in California that building housing and infrastructure takes too long. San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council leader Carol Kim pointed to unions' efforts to translate Biden-era infrastructure funding into projects and jobs, noting that excessive red tape and delays posed 'the biggest challenge in convincing blue collar workers that Democrats were taking the right steps to help working people.' 'We've been doing that work, so this whole abundance stuff is not new,' Kim said. 'What some of us in labor right now are worried about is that it's absolutely being glommed onto by the bad actors, the people who use these types of exceptions to undermine job quality standards or fatten their own pockets.' In some ways, 'abundance' applies a new name to an old idea. Long before Klein's book with Derek Thompson was published, California Democrats — particularly in sapphire-blue San Francisco — had rallied around an agenda that faulted excessive regulation and protracted environmental reviews for stalling needed housing, driving up costs. Bills to speed up that process have repeatedly run into opposition from construction unions who warn of eroded labor standards. But this year the philosophy became inescapable. Legislative leaders met in San Francisco with Klein, who had already forged ties with housing-focused Bay Area elected Democrats. Newsom hosted Klein on his podcast, where the governor said 'abundance is fundamentally, foundationally who we are' and boasted about his administration forcing San Francisco to proceed with a contested housing project. 'You've got an ideological war that's going on in progressive cities,' Newsom told Klein. 'They don't believe in the supply-demand framework. They don't believe in this notion of abundance. Fundamentally, they don't have a growth mindset.' Weeks later, Newsom transformed California's housing debate by sweeping ambitious housing bills into his state budget proposal, putting more pressure on Democratic lawmakers to approve them. The maneuver thrilled abundance-aligned allies whose agenda was now being advanced at the highest echelons of political power. 'The Legislature has a chance to deliver the most significant housing and infrastructure reforms in decades,' Newsom's press office posted on X this week. 'This is our moment to build the California Dream for a new generation.' But Newsom also set up a showdown by making a budget deal contingent on passage of housing legislation. Labor and environmental groups condemned the wage proposal in extraordinarily acrimonious hearings where legislative Democrats echoed concerns about alienating allies. 'To ask the legislature to, in a very sweeping manner in the name of abundance or something ... take down years and years of thoughtful labor standards,' Cortese said, 'should be shocking to people.' Facing enormous pressure, lawmakers on Thursday pulled the minimum-wage bill in a compromise that reverted to existing labor standards, although the proposal could still resurface. Accompanying streamlining legislation was expected to be pared back during negotiations. Those shifts vindicated labor foes and underscored the volatile politics at play. 'The governor has historically pushed the boundaries and tested some creative policies,' said Joseph Cruz, executive director of the California State Council of Laborers. 'We have to make it easier to build in California, and I don't think anyone disputes that. But at what expense to workers?' Eric He contributed to this report.
Politico
2 days ago
- Business
- Politico
California Democrats stage internal war over Gavin Newsom's late push to build more housing
SACRAMENTO, California — Gavin Newsom thought he could push an ambitious housing proposal through California's Democratic-controlled Legislature. Instead, he ran into a wall of resistance from should-be allies angrily comparing his plans to Jim Crow, slavery and immigration raids. Hours of explosive state budget hearings on Wednesday revealed deepening rifts within the Legislature's Democratic supermajority over how to ease California's prohibitively high cost of living. Labor advocates determined to sink one of Newsom's proposals over wage standards for construction workers filled a hearing room at the state Capitol mocking, yelling, and storming out at points while lawmakers went over the details of Newsom's plan to address the state's affordability crisis and sew up a $12 billion budget deficit. Lawmakers for months have been bracing for a fight with Newsom over his proposed cuts to safety net programs in the state budget. Instead, Democrats are throwing up heavy resistance to his last-minute stand on housing development — a proposal that has drawn outrage from labor and environmental groups in heavily-Democratic California. 'Anyone who believed this would not cause a giant explosion — they were living in la-la-land,' said Todd David, a San Francisco political consultant who has worked for state Sen. Scott Wiener and housing-focused groups. For Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender, it was a striking show of resistance from a flank of his own party over housing. A priority of the Democratic governor, Newsom had put his political capital behind an attempt to strong-arm the Legislature by making the entire state budget contingent on passing a bill to speed housing development by relaxing environmental protection rules. A spokesperson for Newsom pointed to a statement Tuesday night emphasizing partnership with lawmakers in reaching a budget deal while noting that 'it is contingent on finalizing legislation to cut red tape and unleash housing and infrastructure development across the state — to build more, faster.' The fault lines on display this week run deep. Construction unions and the statewide California Labor Federation have long resisted housing bills they see as eroding wage standards, often packing hearing rooms with members who urge lawmakers to vote no. Democrats have at times decried their union allies' hardball tactics. But Newsom's unprecedented intervention — and the forceful response from union foes — pushed the conflict into a whole new realm. 'To have legislation that is this large and this significant be forced through at the 11th hour … seems pretty absurd to me,' Democratic state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez said at the hearing. 'I just cannot begin to explain how incredibly inappropriate and hurtful this is.' Scott Wetch, a lobbyist representing the trade unions, contended that this could be the first time since the Jim Crow era that California is 'contemplating a law to suppress wages.' Pérez, who represents a Los Angeles district, said the proposal was 'incredibly insensitive' amid immigration raids targeting mostly 'blue-collar workers who are Latino.' And Kevin Ferreira, executive director of the Sacramento-Sierra's Building and Construction Trades Council, told lawmakers the bill 'will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs.' In a sign of the stakes, the fight quickly spilled beyond California as North America's Building Trades Unions — an umbrella group covering millions of workers across the United States in Canada that rarely intercedes in state politics — sent Newsom a blistering letter warning the bill would 'create a race to the bottom.' Environmental groups piled on late Wednesday, with around 60 of them, including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, blasting the proposal in a letter as a 'backroom Budget Trailer Bill deal that would kill community and environmental protections, even as the people of California are faced with unprecedented federal attacks to their lives and livelihoods.' Unions warned the governor was betraying his Democratic base. Gretchen Newsom, a representative of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Newsom's stance was baffling to people 'looking at the Democratic Party and wondering what comes next for the governor.' 'I see this as a complete debacle and devastating to workers all across California,' said Newsom, who is not related to the governor. Labor leaders were once again at one another's throats, with many opponents faulting carpenters' unions who have backed streamlining efforts. Danny Curtin, director of the California Conference of Carpenters, said the scale of housing woes in California, where the price for the median home now tops $900,000, demanded an aggressive solution. 'The housing crisis is the most politically, socially, economically destabilizing crisis in California,' Curtin said. 'I would give the governor credit for trying to cut through another year of arguing.' In the broader budget negotiations, Newsom had largely capitulated to pushback from lawmakers over the steepest cuts he had proposed making to the state's Medicaid program, particularly for undocumented immigrants. Now, he is putting his political capital behind affordability proposals. But in a sign that Newsom's influence may be waning, lawmakers on Wednesday delayed a vote over wage provisions tucked into a separate budget bill. The proposal would allow developers to set a minimum wage standard for construction workers on certain affordable housing projects that could be lower than what union workers currently command. 'It's not a simple thing around the edges,' said state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat. 'It is a massive change. It challenges the role of collective bargaining in this state that has never been done before.' Wiener, a state budget negotiator who for years has fought to remove obstacles to denser housing development in California, defended the proposal at the hearing as setting a 'floor, not a ceiling' for wages. But he admitted that the swift and ferocious opposition led him to delay the vote. 'It's always appropriate for people to say, 'This needs to be changed, that needs to be changed. This wage is too low, that wage is too low,' Wiener said. 'That's always appropriate.' The governor was markedly less aggressive this year in his efforts to wring a budget deal out of lawmakers. Newsom did not attend caucus meetings in person to make his case for the housing legislation, as he has with previous proposals, although he has been in touch with some lawmakers via text message. Some of that was a matter of timing: Newsom has been preoccupied by the White House launching sweeping immigration raids and then deploying federal troops to Los Angeles, fomenting a standoff that overlapped with budget negotiations. Corey Jackson, a Democrat from Southern California who chairs an Assembly budget committee on human services, said that while he wasn't privy to Newsom's involvement in discussions, California needs a governor who is '24/7 going to be focused' on the state. 'Because our issues are that complicated,' Jackson said. 'And the number of crises that come up in California, as you've seen, will continue to happen every year.'
