He’s really good at grabbing the headline and making bold statements and then leaving the stage and nothing being done,” Jones said.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s second term inauguration took place on Jan. 6, but while Californians tuned in to hear the vision of the governor, portions of the governor’s address appeared to be more of a presidential campaign trial-run. The governor spent the opening minutes talking about his family and their Irish roots and later meandered into attacking decisions taken by Texas and Florida.
State Senator Brian Jones criticized this, noting that Newsom should focus more on improving Californian’s lives than the rest of the country.
“It’s unfortunate that in California, one of the most prosperous states in the country, that our governor continues to use divisive language in his speeches and continues to show that he’s actually not running his campaign or governing for the sake of California. He’s actually running a political campaign against these other states in the country,” said Jones, when asked about this by Rafer Weigel on KUSI.
“Let’s look at a couple examples from 2019 in his inaugural speech and his state of the state speeches back then. He said he was going to end the high speed rail and do something different with those resources. Today four years later, we’ve wasted billions of dollars on, I’d Like to say a train to nowhere.”
Newsom portrayed the states of Texas and Florida as anti-freedom because of their more conservative stance on social issues during his inaugural speech.
“I just want to ask him…, “What do you mean by that?” when 110,000 Californians left California last year and most of them went to those two other states, because there’s more freedom, more opportunity, more chances to have a better lifestyle and people are leaving California on purpose. It’s not by accident that these 110,000 people are leaving California,” Sen Jones said.
Following the address, Sen. Jones tweeted a list of the governor’s top 10 failures in governing the state.
The homeless crisis was the first of the tweets. Jones noted the $10 billion price tag to tackle the issue which still has California as the state with the most homeless and the problem continues to spiral out of control.
“The republicans introduced a package of bills last summer called the ACT package which is Accountability, Compassion and Treatment. The professionals that deal with the homelessness crisis in California agree with this also,” Jones told Weigel. “It takes all three and wrap around services to have a positive impact on somebody who is surviving a homeless situation. And this is having negative impacts on our neighborhoods not just here in San Diego, not just in San Francisco but across the entire state.”
Drought was another challenge for the state. Jones noted that farmers were devastated by drought earlier in the year and no additional water had been supplied. He noted there was no extra water storage in place to capture the extra storm run-offs from the current atmospheric rivers drenching the state.
High gas prices rounded off the top three issues affecting California. Newsom proposed a Windfall Profits tax on gas producers which would increase the cost of gasoline for Californians.
Sen. Jones pointed to the early release of convicted felons as another failure of the Newsom administration. An executive order by the governor made thousands of convicted felons eligible for early release.
Sen Jones told Weigel “Crime is out of control in California, San Francisco, L.A., the crime rates are climbing, violent crimes throughout the state, sexual violence, predators placed in our neighborhoods. These are all things the majority of Californians recognize and realize that are broken and none of that was addressed today in his speech.”
Test scores released by the California Department of Education revealed that two-thirds of the state’s students are not where they needed to be in Math, falling short of the state’s standard and more than 50 percent failed to meet the standard in English as well.
Businesses are leaving California twice as fast as in prior years taking much needed jobs and revenue streams with them.
The next four failures listed by the senator included, the $33 billion unemployment fraud perpetrated on the EDD, the maskless scandal at French laundry and NFL suites where Newsom appeared maskless at these gatherings while encouraging Californians to stay at home, the governor’s inaccuracies in wildfire prevention efforts and his indecision on the high-speed rail money-pit.
“Republicans in California are going to continue to fight for Californians, for all of Californians while he continues to divide Californaians down political lines, political parties for whatever future ambitions he has,” Sen. Jones stated. “The Republican Caucus and the senate are committed to coming forward with bipartisan solutions and working with our Democratic colleagues to make positive changes for all Californians.”
