We were taken aback by a report in Politico that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general and member of Congress, is mulling a run for governor in 2026. The sources were anonymous, but Becerra has amassed a large war chest. If you think Gov. Gavin Newsom has been a problematic governor, we’ve got news for you: It can always get worse.
Becerra is far to the left in his policies, but as AG he also was a tool of powerful police unions. When he was nominated by Biden for his current post, this Editorial Board noted that, “Becerra refused to follow a new law that requires the release of law-enforcement disciplinary records. Courts repeatedly rebuked him … . He even threatened legal action against reporters who had properly obtained some of those records from his office.”
Not only was he a foe of the First Amendment, he had little regard for the second one. The Sacramento Bee reported he “quietly signed a settlement agreement in federal court admitting his agency’s gun-registration website was so poorly designed that potentially thousands of Californians were unable to register their assault weapons and comply with state law.” Do we want a governor who needs the courts to keep him in line?
Governors obviously are partisan, but Becerra showed a willingness to obliterate norms in service of his partisanship. In 2019, we complainedthat he issued the “most disreputable ballot description we’ve seen” in his role of writing descriptors for ballot measures. It involved a split-rolls tax proposal. He made it sound like a noncontroversial effort to boost school funding rather than a massive tax hike. He routinely put union allegiances above the public.
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Even the Los Angeles Times editorial board chastened Becerra for his refusal to even produce a report about Orange County’s snitch scandal, whereby a district attorney and sheriff’s office “ruined numerous criminal prosecutions and substantially undermined faith in the county’s criminal justice system” by misusing jailhouse informants. He’s no friend of constitutional rights.
In Washington, he’s refused to turn over important information about federal policies involving COVID-19. In news reports, senior Biden administration officials told reporters Becerra’s department “is taking too passive a role in what may be the most defining challenge to the administration” regarding the pandemic. So he’s apparently not that competent, either.
Even with the fairly low bar for California governors these days, it’s hard to imagine a worse choice than Becerra. Let’s hope California voters don’t live up to H.L. Mencken’s famous quotation: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
