In this episode of the California Underground podcast, hosts Phil and Camille are joined by guest Mike Garcia to discuss the critical issue of redistricting in California, focusing on Prop 50 and its implications for political representation. Mike shares his background as a former Congressman and military veteran, detailing his journey into politics and the challenges he faced due to redistricting. The conversation delves into the role of independent commissions, the impact of Texas's redistricting efforts, and the complexities of California's election laws, including voter ID issues. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to engage in the political process and educate others about the importance of voting and understanding these issues.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Redistricting and Prop 50
01:41 Mike Garcia's Background and Political Journey
03:39 The Impact of Redistricting on Elections
06:46 Understanding Prop 50 and Its Origins
09:18 California's Redistricting Process Explained
11:29 Changing Political Rules and Their Consequences
15:22 The Texas Redistricting Controversy
21:40 Clarifying the Texas Situation
23:39 California's Voting Laws and Their Implications
30:34 Election Integrity and Voter ID Laws
37:56 California's Political Landscape and Prop 50
45:17 The Implications of Prop 50 on Voter Representation
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Original air date 9.2.25
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00:00:00
Tonight's show all about redistricting, Prop 50.
00:00:03
We're going to be joined by a special guest, former
00:00:05
Congressman Mike Garcia to talk all about that.
00:00:08
And we're going to get into just tonight on this episode of
00:00:11
California Grand Podcast starting right now.
00:00:31
What's going on, everybody? Thanks for tuning to another
00:00:33
episode of the California Underground podcast, the most
00:00:35
trusted podcast for all things California politics.
00:00:38
I am your host, Phil. And tonight's show is all about
00:00:41
redistricting. And I know we've talked a lot
00:00:43
about it, but it is very important.
00:00:45
And it's a short amount of time before we all head to the polls
00:00:48
to vote on Prop 50. We are joined by former
00:00:51
Congressman Mike Garcia. And before we get started, if
00:00:54
you haven't already, make sure you like share, subscribe,
00:00:56
review helps with the algorithm. And let's go ahead and welcome
00:01:00
him in. Mike, welcome to the show.
00:01:02
And as always with me, my trusty coast, the best, the fastest
00:01:05
researcher in the West, Camille. Mike, welcome to the show.
00:01:08
How are you? Good.
00:01:10
Thanks for having me, Phil. Appreciate it, Camille.
00:01:12
Good to see you as well. Great.
00:01:14
Thank you so much. For being here.
00:01:15
Yeah. Thank you.
00:01:16
We have a lot to talk about too tonight because I know we on the
00:01:21
show, we've talked about redistricting, we've touched
00:01:25
upon it, We've done little news hits on it.
00:01:28
But you're here today to really kind of help us dive into
00:01:32
redistricting and kind of get a full lay of the land, what Prop
00:01:36
50 is about. Now that the language is out,
00:01:38
it's going to be on the ballot. Before we get started, why don't
00:01:43
you take a minute to introduce to our listeners and viewers who
00:01:47
you are and we'll go from there. Sure.
00:01:51
Mike Garcia from Southern California.
00:01:53
I live in North Los Angeles County and Santa Clarita, a
00:01:57
little town in the suburbs of Los.
00:01:59
One of the one of the few utopia still left in California.
00:02:03
San Diego's beautiful as well down in your neck of the woods,
00:02:06
but born and raised in Southern California in LA County.
00:02:10
I served in the military. I was an F18 fighter pilot for
00:02:14
roughly 14 years. Carrier boost served in Iraq and
00:02:19
in Afghanistan, or excuse me, Iraq in 2003, multiple
00:02:22
deployments aboard the USS Nimitz.
00:02:25
So saw combat operations and and did so of aviation, but
00:02:30
primarily out of a love of country and wanting beautiful
00:02:34
country. After the Navy, I was an
00:02:37
executive at the Raytheon Company for about 11 years.
00:02:40
And following the 2018 elections, I decided that in
00:02:44
the, in the wake of the blue wave that I, I needed to get off
00:02:47
the sidelines and that I couldn't just complain about
00:02:49
what was going on in politics at the federal level or at the
00:02:53
state level for that matter, without willing and being, you
00:02:57
know, willing to do something about it.
00:02:58
So got the got the idea to run for Congress and, and began that
00:03:02
process and, and that really journey of Providence in 2019
00:03:06
and ended up winning this seat. It was at the time the 25th
00:03:11
Congressional District. And it was the first time in
00:03:13
about 22 years where a Republican was actually able to
00:03:17
flip a seat that was held by an incumbent Democrat in
00:03:20
California. The the other wild stat, by the
00:03:24
way, I've known about any of these stats.
00:03:26
I probably would not have run in the first place, just that given
00:03:28
how long the shot this all seemed at the time.
00:03:30
But I was also the first Republican member of Congress
00:03:35
from California since 1883, which is kind of, you know,
00:03:40
unbelievable. It's, it's, it's hard to believe
00:03:43
that there weren't more Hispanic Republicans in office from
00:03:47
California, but that was the case.
00:03:50
So served for five years ended up becoming a victim of myself
00:03:53
of redistricting in the in the process that took place in 2021
00:03:56
drew a new map in the wake of my special election and then the
00:04:00
general election in 2020 and ran in a very blue map in 2022.
00:04:05
That map continue to get bluer as time went on and we
00:04:08
ultimately couldn't defy gravity for for the for the following
00:04:11
election lost in 2024 in what became effectively AD plus 8D
00:04:17
plus 9 seat, meaning the Democrat party had a 8 or 9
00:04:21
point registration advantage. So that was a that was that was
00:04:24
a tough thing to overcome, especially in a presidential
00:04:27
cycle. So continue to live here in
00:04:29
California and I appreciate what you guys are doing because I
00:04:31
don't want to leave California. I think the, the, the goal is to
00:04:35
try to help California get better and education and
00:04:38
awareness as to what's going on in the local politics scene as
00:04:42
well as at the state level is very important.
00:04:44
And I tell people, look, my, my job as a federal legislator and
00:04:47
my job while I was in the Navy was not to save California
00:04:51
necessarily, but it was to try to help prevent the country from
00:04:54
turning into California. And as much as I love our
00:04:57
beautiful state, the beautiful weather, the beautiful people,
00:05:00
the great jobs we have here, the mountains, the ocean, our
00:05:05
policies are terrible. And frankly, those are all man
00:05:07
made problems. We see.
00:05:08
We've seen it with not just the riots and the fires recently,
00:05:10
but the taxes, the crime rates, the spending that's out of
00:05:14
control, the massive deficits. And it's it's all the product of
00:05:18
human beings who are who are running the show up in
00:05:21
Sacramento, unfortunately. And that's that's why we got to
00:05:23
keep, continue to fight this good fight.
00:05:26
Yeah, I remember your race and it was sort of a inspirational
00:05:32
race in the sense that you had flipped a seat that had not been
00:05:35
flipped in a long time. And it kind of because I feel
00:05:39
like on this show we always talk about like, oh, you got to pay
00:05:41
attention to politics. You got to vote and you got to
00:05:43
get out and vote. And there's so many people in
00:05:45
California who are down on voting in California.
00:05:49
You know, you there's all the conspiracy theories and the
00:05:51
tinfoil hat stuff of, you know, that's it's all rigged from the
00:05:54
moment you show up to the votes and stuff like that.
00:05:56
And I'm like, no, you got to look at these races and like
00:05:59
your race when you won was one of those races where it's like,
00:06:03
it does matter that you do show up and you actually vote.
00:06:06
So your race was one of those inspirational races to say
00:06:10
there's hope. There is hope you can change
00:06:12
California. If you actually show up.
00:06:15
We'll get to the the the story about how you were a victim of
00:06:19
redistricting. So you're, you know, what might
00:06:21
be coming down the Pike a little bit with Prop 50.
00:06:25
But I want to go back for our listeners and viewers and sort
00:06:29
of talk about how this all started.
00:06:31
And we talk about a lot here, the retaliation, what Gavin
00:06:36
Newsom has been saying and going out and making sure he gets
00:06:39
plenty of press coverage for. But I feel like there's a lot of
00:06:43
stuff that how did how did we even get here?
00:06:45
Why, why is there Prop 50? Why did Newsom feel like he had
00:06:49
to retaliate? Like what even started this
00:06:53
snowball rolling down the hill, If you can tell us a little bit
00:06:56
about that. Yeah, and we'll, we'll go back
00:06:59
even a little bit further. Obviously, the Texas
00:07:01
redistricting effort efforts were cited by Newsom as sort of
00:07:04
the catalyst and motivation for him doing what he's doing now.
00:07:07
And, and frankly, what the what the state legislators are doing
00:07:10
as well in Sacramento. And usually we only talk about
00:07:13
these things, you know, at the turn of a decade in 2020, the
00:07:17
census took place and that yields a new map.
00:07:20
Every state has a different rule, right?
00:07:22
And per the Constitution, I believe it's Article 1, Section
00:07:25
4, clause one, the Constitution states at the time, manner and
00:07:31
location of elections is up to the individual states.
00:07:34
It's one of the key elements of federalism that our country
00:07:37
abides by for 250 years, right? So and in that interpretation of
00:07:42
how the time, manner, location is of elections is executed by
00:07:46
the states, each state has developed its own method of
00:07:49
drawing their maps. I would submit, and I'm a strong
00:07:53
federalist, but I was also born in California and I've also seen
00:07:57
the inside of DC pretty closely. I would submit that the country
00:07:59
will be better, better shape if at the federal level the way we
00:08:03
drew maps was was standardized, was normalized in terms of not
00:08:08
just the the map drawing itself, but what counts towards the
00:08:12
census and in terms of the the number of people on a map.
00:08:16
For instance, at the end of a census, the total number of
00:08:20
people are counted, but they, they don't account for citizens
00:08:24
or, or, or, or, or, or immigrants, legal or otherwise.
00:08:28
So they may not be able to vote, but they do change the, the, the
00:08:31
makeup and the quantity of human beings in each map.
00:08:34
OK, California has decided that, you know, this is good.
00:08:37
This goes back several decades now that we are going to
00:08:40
establish an independent Commission and that this
00:08:42
independent Commission is going to be made-up of both Democrats
00:08:45
and Republicans and maybe a few independents sprinkled in.
00:08:48
They're going to go out and they're going to listen to the
00:08:51
towns, the cities, the counties, local entities, whether it's,
00:08:55
you know, local libraries, schools, gun clubs right there.
00:08:59
They're all allowed to come in and testify as to why they want
00:09:02
to be part of the 25th district as opposed to the 26th District.
00:09:06
Why do I want to be in a district with with Ventura
00:09:10
County instead of Los Angeles? That that process typically
00:09:13
takes over a year, sometimes 18 months.
00:09:15
That's what we went to, we underwent in in 2020 leading up
00:09:20
to the new maps that were published in 2021 and 2022.
00:09:24
OK, that is our law California and primarily Newsom in response
00:09:30
and this is his, his, his, you know, this is his rationale for
00:09:34
the for this movement is, is it's in response to Texas's way
00:09:38
of doing business and its desire to change its maps mid cycle as
00:09:42
well. Is now proposing to put a bill
00:09:46
on on on a ballot for a popular vote come November 4th to
00:09:50
determine whether or not this independent Commission is going
00:09:52
to continue to exist. The people are going to vote on
00:09:55
whether or not we're going to dissolve this independent
00:09:57
Commission or basically move forward with these keep the
00:10:03
independent Commission, keep the maps that we have.
00:10:05
And if we remove the independent Commission draw entirely new
00:10:08
maps, which by the way, are already drawn.
00:10:11
So the people aren't going to have an influence or an impact
00:10:14
on what the maps are going to look like because a third party
00:10:16
has already done that homework for us.
00:10:19
And it's extremely overweighted to the Democrat side.
00:10:22
You can imagine we, we only have currently, I believe we have 11
00:10:27
seats out of 52. So roughly 17 nine, sorry.
00:10:31
I got tried to correct you. We only have.
00:10:33
We only have 9. It's worse than that.
00:10:35
Yeah, it's actually worse. So 17 percent, 9 becomes 17% out
00:10:40
of 52 when we had about 42% of the popular vote within the
00:10:45
congressional races. These new maps will knock out
00:10:49
probably 4 seats and we can talk about who, who survives and who
00:10:52
doesn't, which, you know, takes us down to, to roughly 6 1/2,
00:10:57
maybe 7% representation in, at the federal level in Congress.
00:11:01
And the popular vote in this special election will probably
00:11:03
be closer to 45% if it passes. So in terms of party
00:11:07
registration. So, so that's where we're at
00:11:09
right now. It's a changing of the rules.
00:11:11
And I, and I want to go back, Phil, even a little bit further
00:11:13
because this, this tendency to change the rules because they
00:11:16
don't like the outcome is, has become a very systemic problem.
00:11:20
It's a, it's a behavioral pattern that we've noticed.
00:11:23
If you recall when the, when the Supreme Court started making
00:11:26
decisions about 3 or 4 years ago that the far left wasn't in
00:11:30
favor of, they started talking about adding justices or packing
00:11:34
the courts, literally changing the rules midstream because they
00:11:37
didn't like the results. When you, when you saw the
00:11:41
Senate flip and you started seeing the Senate and even
00:11:45
before flip, when it was such a thin majority that the Democrats
00:11:48
held in the Senate, they started talking about ending the
00:11:51
filibuster, which would require 60 votes for an initiative for a
00:11:55
bill to pass in the, in the Senate.
00:11:57
So literally changing the rules, changing the way they vote and
00:12:00
pass the laws in, in the Senate. When, when that wasn't good
00:12:04
enough, they started talking about adding DC and Puerto Rico
00:12:08
as states so that they can get effectively four more senators,
00:12:12
2 from each district that would become states that they knew
00:12:16
damn well we're going to be very blue and would be would yield
00:12:19
for Democrat votes. So again, changing the the
00:12:22
rules, when Nancy Pelosi took control of the House as the
00:12:26
speaker a few years back, her first bill was HR one which
00:12:31
effectively codifies California's election laws at
00:12:36
the federal level. So not only violates the
00:12:38
constitutional clause that I cited earlier that the time,
00:12:42
manner and location is up to the states by federalizing election
00:12:45
laws, but then chooses the worst state of all in terms of how
00:12:48
elections are run. And that's, that's not a
00:12:50
subjective thing, by the way, that's not me, you know,
00:12:53
complaining because because we lost the seat.
00:12:56
This is one of the few states in the country where voter ID is
00:13:00
not required, where you're allowed to have same day
00:13:02
registration, 100% universal vote by mail without any proof
00:13:07
of citizenship. There's no sanitization of the
00:13:09
registration rolls, meaning they don't actually go through and
00:13:12
determine who's still here, who's alive, who's moved.
00:13:15
You know, the ballots are sent regardless.
00:13:18
They allow for ballot harvesting, they allow for
00:13:20
ballot curing. All of these things are taboo in
00:13:24
most states. And, and, and even the voter ID,
00:13:27
which has been one of the more sensitive topics. 70 percent, 35
00:13:31
out of 50 states actually already have a requirement for
00:13:35
some form of ID. OK, so, but Nancy wanted to
00:13:38
formalize California election laws as HR one in which she was
00:13:41
the speaker. The same group that that wanted
00:13:44
to, you know, try to convince us that Afghanistan was a success,
00:13:48
that inflation was transitory, that defunding the police
00:13:51
wouldn't lead to higher crime rates.
00:13:53
And that it was out of the out of the, the, the the notion of
00:13:57
the equity, which is a good thing for the country.
00:13:59
Somehow instead of equality that the same group that was trying
00:14:02
to forgive student debt and, and say that that was constitutional
00:14:07
and, and a right, the same group that was calling the weather
00:14:10
balloon that crossed our entire country, you know, or a spy
00:14:13
balloon, a weather balloon a couple years ago when China was
00:14:16
able to do this. So they have a tendency to
00:14:18
change the rules, change the definitions, change the way they
00:14:20
conduct themselves in order to get political gains and gain
00:14:25
more power. The House has right now a two or
00:14:28
three seat majority held by the Republicans.
00:14:31
Newsom sees this as a problem, especially if he's going to run
00:14:34
for president and and in the meantime, try to be a check and
00:14:38
and frankly nullify most of the progress that the Trump
00:14:42
administration can do, at least from a legislative perspective
00:14:44
in the House. And he's leaning on on this
00:14:47
notion that this was in response to Texas, which is completely
00:14:50
false. It's not in response to Texas.
00:14:52
What Texas did was it was a judicial reckoning that the
00:14:56
Department of Justice had required them to do since 2021
00:15:00
in the wake of some court decisions that we can talk
00:15:02
about. What Newsom and what the
00:15:04
California State legislative bodies members are trying to do
00:15:08
is for political purposes, not for, you know, judicial review.
00:15:12
So that's that's where we're at in a nutshell.
00:15:14
It's a long story to get here, but it's very important that
00:15:17
people understand that background in these and frankly,
00:15:19
these behavior patterns are very dangerous.
00:15:22
Yeah, that's, that's always the the short annotated version of,
00:15:26
well, we're doing it because Texas is trying to get more
00:15:30
seats or gerrymander more seats. And then, of course, you know,
00:15:34
Trump says something and then it gets blown out of proportion.
00:15:37
And then they hang their head on that and they just scream for
00:15:40
the heavens about what Trump says.
00:15:44
And, you know, to the to the layperson, they hear, oh, Texas
00:15:48
is just redrawing their map so they can get Trump more
00:15:50
Republicans in Congress. But as you were just saying,
00:15:53
that's not the entire case that this came about because of other
00:15:58
factors. And I, for one, I've said on
00:16:00
this show, I'm not a fan of this idea of mid decade redistricting
00:16:04
just based on a whim because it does 'cause this sort of back
00:16:09
and forth where now all of a sudden you have all these
00:16:12
different states who are getting in on it going, well, now I want
00:16:14
to redistrict or I want to redistrict.
00:16:16
Now Illinois wants to redistrict and got Massachusetts who wants
00:16:19
to redistrict, even though there's not one Republican
00:16:21
congressman in all of Massachusetts.
00:16:23
So I don't know what they'd be redistrict.
00:16:25
On and break their way, so they gave up on that one pretty
00:16:27
quick. Yeah, I mean, don't waste the
00:16:29
time, but tell us a little bit about why.
00:16:31
Why is Texas even? Why didn't even Texas start
00:16:34
their process that kind of started this whole process or
00:16:39
this whole storyline? So they're they're back in 2021,
00:16:43
there was a court case, the United States, this was under
00:16:45
Biden in the United States versus Texas.
00:16:48
So literally the federal government versus one of the
00:16:50
states that said that the way the maps were drawn were
00:16:53
discriminatory by nature. At the same time, there was this
00:16:56
process, There has been this process at the local levels,
00:17:00
especially. You see it in City Council seats
00:17:02
right now and at the city level where they try to draw maps that
00:17:06
are representative of the way the demographics are in a given
00:17:10
area, Right. So, and at first blush, that
00:17:12
sounds like a noble concept, sounds right, It sounds equal.
00:17:16
But it's it's really not. That's not how maps should be
00:17:20
drawn. That's not how maps historically
00:17:21
have been drawn. But there's been a lot of
00:17:23
litigation on this issue. And so the federal government
00:17:26
sues the state of Texas saying, hey, your current maps are
00:17:28
discriminatory in nature. They're not accounting for the
00:17:31
racial demographic breakup and, and you know, effectively should
00:17:35
be redrawn as a result. At the same time, there was a
00:17:39
league of United Latin American citizens who joined in similar
00:17:43
litigation against the state of Texas trying to get more what,
00:17:47
what would be effectively minority districts redrawn.
00:17:52
However, everything kind of changes in 2024 when you've got
00:17:55
the 5th Circuit in the Pettaway versus Galveston County ruling,
00:17:59
which says that these these minority districts or these
00:18:02
coalition districts are are effectively not violations of
00:18:07
Section 2 of the Voter Rights Act.
00:18:09
Effectively saying that these aren't legitimate claims, that
00:18:13
these lawsuits are not grounded on substantiated assertions.
00:18:18
And that, you know, these maps don't need to be, you know,
00:18:22
reflective of, of what was being asserted in in the text in the
00:18:26
United States versus Texas lawsuit.
00:18:28
OK, So now we're in a position where the maps have changed and
00:18:31
the, and, and the state of Texas is now trying to abide by a 2024
00:18:36
court decision to get back to what was effectively the right
00:18:41
maps were closer to the right maps, You know, given, given
00:18:44
some of the demographic shifts since then, census populations
00:18:48
have changed. And Texas, frankly, their
00:18:50
constitution says that. And again, going back to the the
00:18:53
Constitution, the federal Constitution says that it's up
00:18:56
to the states. In this case, the Texas State
00:18:59
constitution says that, you know, it's up to the state
00:19:02
legislative body to determine the maps and the timing of the
00:19:05
new maps. And so this is completely
00:19:07
constitutional per state law. It's consistent now with the the
00:19:12
judicial branch rulings coming out of the 2024 cases.
00:19:16
And they're truing up back to what both the judicial and the
00:19:19
executive branches have asked them to go do.
00:19:21
OK, that has yielded, obviously, you know, what I referred to as
00:19:26
the purse slapping, which is other states saying, hey, if
00:19:29
you're going to do it, then we're going to do it to you when
00:19:31
it's effectively, you know, slapping each other across the
00:19:33
face with these, with these new maps.
00:19:36
And and like you said, other states can get involved here and
00:19:38
this, this can be, you know, effectively mutually assured
00:19:42
destruction. If every state decided that it
00:19:44
was going to troll to lead the timing and the, and the rules
00:19:47
that they've set in place. By the way, Texas isn't doing
00:19:51
that. They're just abiding by their
00:19:52
own rules. Newsom, the control alt, the
00:19:55
lead of their own rules. But if Florida, Indiana, you
00:19:58
know, we talked about Texas, but also Missouri tried to do this,
00:20:02
the net result would be very favorable to conservatives.
00:20:05
It would it would break in, in the, in the way of the
00:20:07
Republican Party by by, you know, 5 to 6 more seats in the
00:20:10
House. Newsom needs to be careful.
00:20:13
He's playing with fire. I personally don't think it's
00:20:15
popular. I don't think the special
00:20:18
election. In a vacuum, with full education
00:20:22
and awareness and with good election laws would have a
00:20:25
chance to pass. Unfortunately, a lot of these
00:20:28
initiatives rely on under under informed voters.
00:20:32
They rely on tricky messaging. Commercials will be, you know,
00:20:36
to the tune of $500 million from both sides marketing this with
00:20:40
spin and with words that have nothing to do with actually
00:20:44
what's going on to try to trick people.
00:20:46
Just like the, the, you know, the, the bridges and highways
00:20:48
bill that end up being our gas tax had nothing to do with
00:20:51
bridges and highways in the end, right?
00:20:52
The Inflation Reduction Act had nothing to do with inflation in
00:20:55
the end. The president even acknowledged
00:20:57
that. So it, it does have a chance,
00:20:59
especially with the election laws in California.
00:21:02
I don't trust them. I'm not a conspiracy theorist,
00:21:05
but anytime you have election laws that that have enough, you
00:21:08
know, leeway in, in, in terms of how ballots are counted, where
00:21:11
they're counted, who the ballots are going to.
00:21:14
You can drive a truck through the registration rules right
00:21:16
now. The way they're written and
00:21:17
they're not updated for the last, you know, 20 years or so,
00:21:21
It's it's got a chance to pass. So I listened to everything you
00:21:25
said. I heard you.
00:21:27
I just want to clarify because I feel like this is such an
00:21:29
important point. TX What they're doing now under
00:21:33
President Trump began under President Biden, yes.
00:21:39
That's right. That's right.
00:21:41
Yes, it was. It was in reaction.
00:21:43
The initial catalyst for their movement was the result of a
00:21:46
case in 2021 when the DOJ sued Texas.
00:21:51
Yeah. OK, that's fascinating.
00:21:54
I again, I heard you. I just really wanted to clarify
00:21:56
that point because it's such an important point as people are.
00:22:01
And I'll admit that I haven't fully understood the Texas part
00:22:05
of things and you explained it very well.
00:22:06
So I very much appreciate that. So thank you because I, I think
00:22:11
I sent Phil, I think I sent you a timeline that I asked AI about
00:22:15
of all these lawsuits. And there were so many lawsuits,
00:22:18
so many in Texas that, you know, that one started and then people
00:22:21
started suing the state and a lot of them got thrown out.
00:22:24
And I was just like, Phil's a lawyer.
00:22:25
I'll just send this to him, like maybe he'll explain to me.
00:22:29
But so thank you. I appreciate that you did an
00:22:31
excellent job of explaining that and.
00:22:34
By and by the way, Camille, I'm not trying to, you know, make
00:22:36
the assertion that it was politically motivated that the
00:22:39
DOJ did what they did. They they may have with good
00:22:41
intention and thought they were doing it on good legal rounds.
00:22:44
But the reality is, is that the same DOJ and the same judicial
00:22:48
branch in, in this case the 5th Circuit three years later
00:22:51
overruled that ruling, right. And in 2020 we decided.
00:22:55
So, you know, I'll, I'll assume pure intent across the board
00:23:00
for, for both cases and pure motivations, but they are where
00:23:05
they are as a result of those cases in Texas at least.
00:23:09
That's actually fascinating to me because I didn't know that
00:23:13
I'm going to admit and I I didn't know that it.
00:23:17
And like you said, it wasn't probably intentional or
00:23:19
political. It's just one of those things
00:23:21
that had probably the unintended consequence that probably the
00:23:26
Biden administration DOJ started when they did this.
00:23:30
So for anybody who's listening and they get into a, a tit for
00:23:33
tat about this and say, oh, well, Trump is doing it because
00:23:37
he wants to gerrymander. Well, he can say, well, actually
00:23:39
it's a result of the BI administration DOJ.
00:23:41
So into cure the maps and all that.
00:23:45
I did want to talk about, I mean, real quickly, because I
00:23:47
know people in the chat are probably going to talk want to
00:23:50
talk about this as well. I I certainly agree that there
00:23:53
are a lot of things about California's voting that is to
00:23:59
the rest of the country looks wild, I mean.
00:24:03
It's insane. You tell people like they, they,
00:24:07
you know, I go back East, I visit friends, I'm from New
00:24:10
Jersey and they go, what is this ballot harvesting?
00:24:13
What? What the heck is ballot
00:24:14
harvesting? I'm like, well, if you don't
00:24:16
vote, someone can say, hey, so and so didn't vote, so we have
00:24:20
your information. We'll go to your house and say
00:24:23
you're not voting. Can we take your ballot?
00:24:25
Or you can do that. And then we're just going to
00:24:27
harvest all these ballots and just dump them in.
00:24:30
And maybe I'm an old curmudgeon, but I think if you're too lazy
00:24:34
to get off your butt and actually go vote, that vote just
00:24:38
won't get cast. That's the end of that vote.
00:24:40
Like, I don't think. Well, not.
00:24:42
Only that even under the the traditional rules, right even if
00:24:47
you're too lazy or say you know you're, you're not able to right
00:24:50
You're you're elderly or you have a disability.
00:24:53
In most states you can request a mail in absentee ballot you're
00:24:57
military or overseas. These are all very valid
00:25:00
reasonable accommodations. The the state of California goes
00:25:04
even further though, by saying not only can you ballot harvest,
00:25:07
but there there's really no reason to ballot harvest in our
00:25:10
state. You're you're mailed a a ballot
00:25:13
with a self addressed stamped envelope that's free.
00:25:17
So as long as you can walk to your mailbox, which I assume
00:25:20
most can by the way, people should be offended if if they if
00:25:24
they if they're told that they can't get to their own
00:25:26
mailboxes, just like minority should be offended that asking
00:25:29
for a voter ID is racist. That's absurd.
00:25:31
As with the last name of Garcia, if someone tells me I'm a
00:25:34
minority and you, I should be offended by voter ID, the
00:25:37
implication is that I don't, I, you know, I can't get a driver's
00:25:39
license because my last name is Garcia.
00:25:41
That's wild to me. That's, that's the offensive
00:25:43
piece, right? So, you know, it's the, it's the
00:25:47
sum of the parts, which is that yields a broken system.
00:25:53
That's two key issues within our election laws.
00:25:56
And by the way, they're very reasonable issues.
00:25:59
We, we would be OK as a state. We still have a hard time as, as
00:26:02
conservatives, but at least we would know we, we have a fair
00:26:05
fight even in blue districts. Those two changes are voter ID
00:26:09
should be very reasonable, very rational.
00:26:10
Everyone's, everyone's required to show an ID getting on a
00:26:13
plane, Everyone's had that conversation.
00:26:15
That should be a default answer. Voter ID should be a short putt.
00:26:19
The second thing is the standardization of the
00:26:21
registration rolls. We have lost population.
00:26:25
I don't know what the numbers are.
00:26:26
Last I checked, it was like, you know, 2 million fewer people
00:26:29
living in California than just six years ago.
00:26:31
It's why we lost a congressional seat in in the House.
00:26:34
We would probably lose 2 more if the census was redone right now
00:26:37
because of the exodus. But there are now still more
00:26:40
ballots going out every election than there were just three years
00:26:43
ago, definitely more than six years ago.
00:26:46
OK. So they are not when, when
00:26:48
you're, you know, kid goes to college, they still get a
00:26:51
ballot. When your dad or grandfather
00:26:53
dies, they still get a ballot. And by the way, it's mailed to
00:26:56
the last address on record, not even where they live
00:26:59
necessarily. So God knows who's getting it.
00:27:01
And I'm not saying that there's fraud, but that sure opens the,
00:27:05
the, the window for fraud when you can ballot harvest.
00:27:09
So there's no tracking of where the ballots been.
00:27:11
You can cure ballots. So you can just sign, you know,
00:27:14
sign these ballots and, and, and submit them after the election.
00:27:17
You have 30 days to send this this the ballot in, and then
00:27:22
you've got something like 10 days after the Election Day for
00:27:24
the ballot to arrive. By the way, the legislators in
00:27:26
Sacramento are trying to change that role so that you can
00:27:29
actually, you know, send your ballot a week after in in that
00:27:34
case. But that sure makes it easy to
00:27:35
do the math, so. I've I know this point is sorry,
00:27:43
go ahead, go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say I know this
00:27:46
point has been beaten to death, that you just brought up the
00:27:48
plain arguments. But I had this thought just the
00:27:50
other night that I realized every state in the United States
00:27:55
to get a marriage license, you have to show ID.
00:27:57
So I guess marriage is also racist and.
00:28:03
Not to totally off the hook, but I'm I'm.
00:28:06
Almost OK with that because I'm like, wait, why did we give
00:28:09
marriage to the government anyway?
00:28:10
Anyway, that's a whole different topic, but just throwing that
00:28:12
out there. Yeah, yeah.
00:28:14
I you're, you're, you're, I understand where you're going
00:28:17
with that one. But yeah, it's it, it it's
00:28:19
absurd. These excuses make no sense.
00:28:21
They're the, the bottom line is all of these rules, which would
00:28:24
effectively have been HR one which if the, if the Dems had
00:28:27
control of the House, the Senate and the White House were able to
00:28:29
pass through legislation when they had the control, HR would
00:28:33
have HR one would have codified our laws at the state level into
00:28:37
every fifty of the states around us in the entire country.
00:28:40
There is no rationale for these things except for political
00:28:45
purposes in a very blue state that that's all it is.
00:28:48
They'll do it under the auspices of equity, which which isn't
00:28:52
guaranteed by our Constitution. You guys know equality is
00:28:54
guaranteed by our Constitution, not equity.
00:28:57
And and they'll couch it as, hey, we're trying to do the
00:28:59
right thing. These aren't the right thing.
00:29:01
It's not the right thing for anyone.
00:29:02
So it's it's all smoke and mirrors, at least from from
00:29:05
California. I, I want to echo your point
00:29:09
about the idea of, well, we can't have voter ID because it
00:29:13
will hurt minorities. And my wife grew up in Tijuana
00:29:17
and she, she tells me about how the elections are run down in
00:29:21
Mexico. And I was like, OK, well, let's,
00:29:23
we'll, let's concede that we'll run elections like Mexico one
00:29:27
day voting voter ID. Pretty sure you put your finger
00:29:32
in the 24 hour ink so that you can't come back later on.
00:29:36
Now, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of other issues with
00:29:38
Mexican voting because of cartels and stuff like that, But
00:29:41
I'm just saying the procedure, if that's, I mean, that seems
00:29:45
fine. I mean, I guess that's racist to
00:29:47
them is to require voter ID so you can tell all of Mexico that
00:29:51
they're racist. It it just becomes more of a
00:29:55
numbers game. It's more like they see these
00:29:57
printouts in this data information, these voter rolls
00:29:59
and go, we have this many voters, you know, we have a 2 to
00:30:02
one advantage basically on the Republicans and the
00:30:06
independents. So if we just know that we can
00:30:09
get more votes by making it longer, by making it easier for
00:30:14
us to go get those votes, it it's like Pokémon Go, it's just
00:30:18
like let's go collect them all. It's just, it's not about
00:30:20
getting people to the vote to actually exercise their voice in
00:30:24
this process. It's these are numbers.
00:30:27
We just need to get these numbers in and it doesn't matter
00:30:30
whether we have good policies or bad policies.
00:30:33
It's how many people's ballots and these numbers can we check
00:30:38
off here in California. And that's the upsetting thing
00:30:40
is that at the end of the day, you can say, oh, well, this
00:30:42
person won, but did they truly win because they had the will of
00:30:48
the people? Or is it because they had a
00:30:49
better ground game that knew how to ballot harvest, that knew how
00:30:53
to go cure, that knew how to do all these these different
00:30:56
election tactics and some of these races?
00:31:00
We we can't even answer that second part with with it's not
00:31:02
even that right? It's it's I would concede to to
00:31:06
someone who has a better ground game or someone that's a better
00:31:09
ballot harvester or ballot cure. We, we did that.
00:31:11
We won under those circumstances.
00:31:13
The problem now is you can't even attribute necessarily to
00:31:16
those things, right? Because of the duration of the
00:31:19
vote, because of the universal vote by mail, because of the
00:31:23
dead people and people who have moved, because of the DMV, you
00:31:27
know, defaulting registration to to Democrat for so many years
00:31:31
before that was rectified a few years ago.
00:31:33
Because of these things, we can't even attribute it to a
00:31:36
hard working candidate or a well funded campaign even for that
00:31:39
matter, right? It's very, it's very murky at
00:31:42
best. SO, and the bottom line is it's
00:31:44
not about race. It's not, it's not about because
00:31:47
it, it, it, it's, it's the, the ID is about what?
00:31:52
Proving that you're a legal citizen.
00:31:53
That's it. Mexico asked for ID not because
00:31:55
they, they are, you know, worried about your race.
00:31:57
They just want to make sure that you're a legal Mexican citizen.
00:32:00
That's the same thing that they do in Iraq, by the way.
00:32:02
You know, pretty much every country in the world ask for
00:32:04
some form of identification. And it's not unprecedented.
00:32:07
I want to focus on this because it's not unprecedented.
00:32:10
The federal election laws do exist within the Constitution.
00:32:15
The Constitution describes who can vote at what age, right?
00:32:19
There's an amendment to the constitution that says 18 year
00:32:21
olds can vote. There's an amendment to the
00:32:23
constitution that says females can vote, that says blacks can
00:32:25
vote. All of these things have been
00:32:27
codified and, and, and formally recognized as in the form of a,
00:32:31
an amendment to our nation's constitution.
00:32:34
We need an amendment to the federal Constitution that
00:32:37
requires voter ID, OK, All, all it's doing is, is not changing
00:32:41
who can vote or the time, manner, location of the the
00:32:44
elections for, for, you know, the Constitution.
00:32:47
It's, it's just saying, hey, if you're an American citizen and
00:32:50
you're of age, prove it very rational position to be in.
00:32:53
So we we do that and that would solve a lot of the problems.
00:32:57
And I think this president, President Trump's going to be
00:32:58
pushing for a national federal ID law.
00:33:01
This is one of the pieces of legislation that I could, I
00:33:03
frankly couldn't get our own party to embrace because they
00:33:06
said it was, you know, California problem where they
00:33:08
said it was a federalism collision and they weren't
00:33:10
comfortable voting for it because of the, you know, the
00:33:13
states rights issues that it invokes.
00:33:15
So this is part of the problem. But we we do have a path forward
00:33:18
and it's it's fixable from the federal level down through the
00:33:22
States, and it should be mandated by the Constitution.
00:33:26
So here's my concern. We know California's corrupt,
00:33:31
whether you know, voter fraud or not.
00:33:33
Any conspiracies aside, we do know that our current
00:33:37
legislation does not seem to honor the will of the people.
00:33:41
Governor Newsom is doing this trying to act like he's a
00:33:44
moderate and he wants to hear the voice of the people.
00:33:46
And, you know, I'm just doing this in fairness, and it's so
00:33:49
I'm going to let the people decide.
00:33:50
Well, the people decided on Prop 36, which he fought so hard to
00:33:53
keep off of the ballot last November.
00:33:57
And then he even introduced his own poison bills and then, you
00:34:01
know, on and on we saw him fight against it, saying we don't need
00:34:03
it, it's not necessary. All these things $0.36 of on the
00:34:07
ballot, it overwhelmingly passes in California.
00:34:10
And here we are almost a year later and they're like, oh, we
00:34:14
don't have the budget, we're not implementing it.
00:34:16
So I worry that even if the people speak up and say, you
00:34:20
know, whether it's major super majority overwhelming whatever
00:34:24
and they've so no on Prop 50, what are legislators that are
00:34:29
super majority Democrat and you know, all bowing down to King
00:34:32
Newsom? What are they going to do with
00:34:34
that? Even if their their will fails?
00:34:37
Like that's where I'm concerned is because we see they just do
00:34:41
what they want and I don't, I don't think that's.
00:34:43
Very. Fun.
00:34:45
I resonate with that sentiment. It's it's very disheartening,
00:34:48
right? And, and yeah, the irony of this
00:34:50
new Kings thing is that we in California have been subjected
00:34:54
to effectively a tyrannical majority, a tyrannical monarch
00:34:59
in the form of Newsome since, since COVID hit.
00:35:02
And there's plenty of evidence of that, starting with, you
00:35:05
know, the French Laundry incident, obviously.
00:35:06
But look, it's very disheartening.
00:35:09
But, but as Phil mentioned in the beginning of the podcast,
00:35:11
you know, my, my election, it, it was, was was proof that votes
00:35:17
do matter, right? We, we won this fight.
00:35:19
We weren't supposed to win. They spent 25 against me
00:35:22
in 2020. They spent, you know, 25 to 30
00:35:24
in it in subsequent elections since then.
00:35:27
But we ended up winning by just 333 votes, OK.
00:35:31
The reason we, we won by just 333 out of, you know, 340,
00:35:36
by the way. So that's, you know, .01%.
00:35:39
I think just because we worked harder, we did ballots here, we
00:35:42
bet, we ballot it harvested, we, we knew the rules.
00:35:44
We were better at the game than than our Democrat opponent was.
00:35:49
And eventually the, the maps become so blue, right?
00:35:52
And, and that was, you know, and that that was one of the reasons
00:35:55
my map was redrawn. I wasn't supposed to win.
00:35:58
We won Despite that. They made it even bluer.
00:36:01
And then we won again in 2022 and then in the presidential
00:36:05
cycle in 2024 became overwhelming.
00:36:07
So the point of this is to prevent the, the squeakers, to
00:36:11
prevent the, you know, the, the, the, the leakers from, from
00:36:14
being able to compete in swing districts like mine used to be.
00:36:18
And that's the untold story. Not only are they wiping out
00:36:20
four seats that incumbents currently hold right now, maybe
00:36:24
5, but they're also taking the swing districts, you know, John
00:36:28
Duarte's district in Central California, my district in North
00:36:32
LA, Michelle Steele's district where she lost last cycle by
00:36:36
just a few 100 votes. They're turning those swing
00:36:38
districts into unwinnable and obtainable seats for
00:36:42
conservatives. And so really in a midterm, we
00:36:45
would have picked up those three seats plus kept to four.
00:36:48
So it's really a A7 seat swing at a minimum relative to what we
00:36:52
would have had had we kept these maps.
00:36:53
So, so the motivations are very self-evident, especially in
00:36:57
this. But, and, and to your point,
00:36:58
yeah, we, we got to fight the fight.
00:36:59
We've got to, we've got to beat down the selection.
00:37:02
And every time they change the rules and, and again, your
00:37:04
points consistent with mine, Camille, they, they try to
00:37:07
change the rules And when they don't get the results that they
00:37:09
want, they will change the, the, the rules will change the
00:37:12
definitions of things. And it's all levels of
00:37:15
government. By the way, remember, we had
00:37:16
two, we had two or three quarters of, of negative GDP and
00:37:22
President Biden changed the definition of a recession, which
00:37:24
was, which was formalized, you know, almost a century ago,
00:37:28
where two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
00:37:30
That's a recession by definition.
00:37:32
When we experienced that under his tenure, he said, oh, that's
00:37:34
not, that's no longer the definition of recession.
00:37:37
This is the tendencies of the left, unfortunately, But we've
00:37:40
got to keep fighting it. And that's why, that's why it's
00:37:42
important to educate people. You don't give up.
00:37:45
If you give up, then you should move.
00:37:46
But you should, if you're going to be here, you should keep
00:37:49
fighting and you should keep voting.
00:37:51
And, and we need to win despite these rules and we can.
00:37:53
We just have to win by a larger margin.
00:37:56
I think it's a perfect segue into where we're at now with
00:38:00
Prop 50 and what we're looking at coming down the Pike and this
00:38:05
election that's coming up on November 4th.
00:38:08
Is that when it's coming up? I think.
00:38:10
So yeah, yes, November 4th special election, it's the only
00:38:14
thing we're voting on. Tell us about Prop 50.
00:38:20
And you had mentioned who are, you know, Kevin Kiley's one.
00:38:23
I know that's obviously being targeted, but there's others
00:38:27
that are being targeted who would go from safe Republican to
00:38:31
now all of a sudden safe Democrat overnight with Prop 50.
00:38:36
Yeah, we'll start S to north or at least as close as I can
00:38:38
remember them. Darrell Issa down in San Diego
00:38:41
in your neck of the woods would would would effectively not
00:38:44
really be able to run in his seat.
00:38:47
Ken Calvert in San Bernardino Riverside very swing district
00:38:51
and especially in the presidential cycle is pretty
00:38:53
solid in a midterm becomes very blue, solid blue.
00:38:58
Kevin Kiley's you mentioned was, was basically drawn out.
00:39:03
Young Kim's seat down in Orange County is, is now in jeopardy.
00:39:08
And what we might see is there was a, there was a map drawn
00:39:12
somewhere in the vicinity of Young Kim and Ken Calvert.
00:39:15
Maybe in between them. There may be, you know, a
00:39:20
decision by one of them to run in that map, but you know, one
00:39:23
of them would need to step down if that was the case.
00:39:25
So still unclear what would happen there.
00:39:28
So, and then you've got the three swing seats, Duarte's mine
00:39:31
and Michelle Steele's down in Orange County.
00:39:33
That was very much in play in the in these old maps.
00:39:37
So the, the, the lone survivors would be Mcclintock, you know,
00:39:42
in the Sierra Nevada, Vince Fong just to the north of me, Kevin
00:39:46
McCarthy's old seat there in Bakersfield, Obernaulte seat out
00:39:52
in East East Riverside up into the mountains, Mammoth Bishop
00:39:56
area. And then maybe, and then maybe,
00:39:59
like I said, a seat down in Orange County.
00:40:01
Those, that's, that would be what we would be left with
00:40:04
effectively 4 healthy seats at that point.
00:40:06
So, and ironically, they're all, you know, the common denominator
00:40:10
for all of them is that, you know, they're, they're more than
00:40:12
50 miles away from the coast. And when you look at the maps
00:40:15
that were drawn, you know. The shape of these maps is
00:40:18
ridiculous. You want to talk, you want to
00:40:19
look at the definition of gerrymandering.
00:40:21
I mean, it's it's it's ridiculous at a granular level.
00:40:25
The effort that they went to to make sure that they were
00:40:27
screwing conservatives in this state.
00:40:29
It's it's pretty eye watering. It's actually impressive for,
00:40:32
you know, evil genius type level of metrics there that they were
00:40:35
able to pull this off. This map is is is a Tetris
00:40:38
highest levels. So but I don't think I don't
00:40:41
think the voters are going to fall for it.
00:40:42
I think there's going to be a lot of spinning in a lot of
00:40:45
words, a lot of money being spent.
00:40:47
But I honestly think that voters, if they take the time to
00:40:51
understand it, will not vote for it.
00:40:54
And I don't, and I think that's true even for Democrats.
00:40:56
I have a lot of friends who are liberals.
00:40:58
They, they don't, they don't appreciate this, these types of
00:41:02
shenanigans and, and, and political motivated, politically
00:41:05
motivated actions like this. So, but again, that's an
00:41:08
imperfect scenario and I don't, I don't know that we're going to
00:41:10
have that. I am actually in Young Kim's
00:41:14
district, District 40, and the city that I am in is very
00:41:18
conservative still. It's definitely slowly but
00:41:21
surely getting lower and lower. But historically we have been
00:41:24
like bright red, blood red, you know, very red.
00:41:28
And yeah, now I'm drawn into that, possibly getting in, drawn
00:41:33
into a blue district. And that's obviously very
00:41:36
bothersome. Yeah, yeah, At least Katie
00:41:40
Porter's not down there anymore. She might be our new governor,
00:41:42
but she's not. She won't be your.
00:41:44
You know, I mean, again, not to get off topic, but I don't feel
00:41:46
like people are talking about her.
00:41:48
No, she's she's made herself irrelevant.
00:41:51
So and there's there's still a lot of time left on the clock,
00:41:53
but. True, true.
00:41:54
She's always, she's always trying to insert herself.
00:41:58
That was a scary thought. Why would you?
00:42:00
Why would you put that out in the universe?
00:42:01
Mike. Katie Porter.
00:42:03
Katie Porter, Fun fact, her, her brother, it was my roommate at
00:42:09
the Naval Academy back in the late 90s.
00:42:12
And he makes sure he's so far left.
00:42:14
He makes her look like Ronald Reagan.
00:42:16
He, he is the probably the furthest left naval officer or
00:42:20
officer in the military period that I've ever met.
00:42:23
And and you know, that's shocking relative to his sister.
00:42:28
That is pretty shocking to hear that someone's farther left than
00:42:30
Katie Porter. It, it is the, the language is
00:42:35
pretty interesting because they keep saying, oh, it's, you know,
00:42:39
we're giving this power to the people.
00:42:41
It's going to be super transparent and you know, it's
00:42:43
just this one time thing. But they're not giving power
00:42:46
back to the independent Commission until 2030.
00:42:49
Is that correct? I thought that's what I read is
00:42:51
that from here until 2030, the independent commission's going
00:42:55
to have no control. Oh, it's going to be the
00:42:57
legislature from here until then, right?
00:43:00
Yeah, it's effectively suspending the state rules until
00:43:02
2030 until the next census happens, which, by the way,
00:43:04
isn't going to favor them either.
00:43:06
By the way, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the independent
00:43:08
Commission, but it's it's at least transparent.
00:43:10
At least we have a, a, a venue normally to go testify in front
00:43:13
of them. And it is more, you know,
00:43:16
engaging for the average citizen.
00:43:17
But yeah, yes, that they're going to do it under the, you
00:43:20
know, the auspices of transparency and giving power
00:43:23
back to the people. The people voted for this
00:43:25
already decades ago for this independent Commission.
00:43:28
There is no transparency. The average citizen right now
00:43:30
has no idea what Prop 50 is. You guys are very smart.
00:43:33
You're, you're all informed on these issues.
00:43:35
But the average voter is not right now.
00:43:37
So they're going to be hearing commercials.
00:43:39
They're not going to have an option to go to hearings.
00:43:41
They're not going to be having have an option to go to, you
00:43:43
know, City Council meetings to give their inputs for the
00:43:46
redistricting, the redrawing, the maps are already drawn.
00:43:49
So if you want to say you're giving power to the people,
00:43:52
let's vote on this, whether we dissolve the independent
00:43:55
Commission. So then let's let the people
00:43:57
draw the maps. Let's say that the people have
00:43:58
the, you know, the forums to go give their inputs for the maps.
00:44:02
You have preordained these maps. And now you're asking the people
00:44:05
to, you know, effectively close your eyes and, and, and just
00:44:10
give you the benefit of the doubt.
00:44:11
Hit the I believe button with a regime that should not be
00:44:14
believed at all. And and frankly has shown a
00:44:17
proclivity to do the opposite of of of what is democratic and
00:44:21
transparent. I think that might be the whole
00:44:25
ironic thing about this that I'm still trying to wrap my head
00:44:28
around, and I'm trying to at least see from their point of
00:44:31
view, their logic that they're trying to combat
00:44:37
disenfranchising voters in Texas, which we've already gone
00:44:40
over. They're not actively trying to
00:44:41
disenfranchise voters in Texas, but their response to
00:44:44
disenfranchising voters in Texas is let's disenfranchise our own
00:44:51
voters here in California. So those people who have
00:44:53
representatives like a Kevin Kiley, like a young kid, like
00:44:56
all these different congressional members, let's
00:44:59
just disenfranchise them. Their vote doesn't matter
00:45:02
anymore. We're just going to take their
00:45:03
Rep away. We're going to disenfranchise.
00:45:05
This is your new district. Get used to it.
00:45:07
And it's all because we want to thumb our nose at Trump.
00:45:10
And I've I, I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
00:45:13
And I, I mean, is it as confusing to you as it is to me
00:45:16
that that's their? I mean, I there's no
00:45:18
rationalizing it, right? It's not confusing when you know
00:45:20
that it's just a political tool for them.
00:45:24
That's all it is. You can't rationalize it.
00:45:27
You can't try to understand the logic.
00:45:28
There is no logic except for them trying to rig the rules,
00:45:32
change the rules, rig the system.
00:45:34
Going from 17 to 18%. You know, representation in the
00:45:38
House of Representatives is not, you know, enfranchising anyone
00:45:42
that is disenfranchising at the highest level, which by the way,
00:45:45
again, like I said, most of the Democrat voters, this is not a
00:45:48
hit on the Democrat voters in California.
00:45:50
This is a hit on Newsom and the 2/3 super majority up in
00:45:53
Sacramento and the state Assembly and the state Senate.
00:45:55
The average voter, when they understand these issues, will
00:45:58
not support these types of shenanigans because it doesn't
00:46:01
make sense. To your point, Phil, I mean, we
00:46:03
should try to understand the motives, but in this case,
00:46:06
they're pretty blatantly obvious.
00:46:07
It's just they're trying to gaslight us into making it sound
00:46:09
like it's something that it's not, right.
00:46:12
The point is, is that it's it's all politically motivated.
00:46:16
He is they they are trying to execute the will of a very far
00:46:19
left progressive federal agenda. And they are losing on policies,
00:46:23
they're losing on execution, they're losing on the issues,
00:46:27
they're losing popularity and they're grasping for straws
00:46:30
right now. And this is this is the form of
00:46:33
grasping for straws. And ironically, in a state where
00:46:35
straws are illegal, but there, this is the the last gasp of a
00:46:39
tyrannical very far left agenda. By the way, I don't even know
00:46:43
Newsom is this far left. He's just trying to get the
00:46:45
embrace of the Democrat Party for a presidential nomination
00:46:48
going into the presidential cycle.
00:46:50
That's all this is. It's like Rick Caruso's not a
00:46:52
not a liberal, he's not a progressive.
00:46:54
He's not even a Democrat. But he's willing to spend a lot
00:46:56
of money and do whatever is possible to get the warm hug and
00:46:59
embrace of the Democrat Party so that he can be a potential
00:47:02
nominee for the the governor's race in California.
00:47:05
These people are selling their souls.
00:47:07
It's fear based behavior rather than principle based behavior.
00:47:10
And they are at their core, politicians who really don't
00:47:13
have the best interests of their constituents in mind.
00:47:16
They're doing it for their own political gain.
00:47:18
It's that simple. So.
00:47:21
We have a question from from the chat Why can't the courts shut
00:47:27
down Prop 50 since it's in clear conflict with the California
00:47:30
Constitution? Yeah.
00:47:32
So this was the workaround and this is what we, again, I was, I
00:47:35
was saying this as well in the very beginning.
00:47:38
This is a clear violation. If, if they were to just impart
00:47:42
these maps on the states, implement them, that would be a
00:47:45
violation of the state's constitution.
00:47:47
They have gone around this, this violation of the state's
00:47:51
constitution by putting it on a special election ballot.
00:47:54
Basically our state's constitution says you can change
00:47:56
the rules as long as you put it on a put it on a ballot
00:47:59
initiative. OK, so per, per the, the, the
00:48:03
letter of the law and the Constitution, what they are
00:48:06
doing now is constitutional. And the, the irony is obviously
00:48:11
that they are, they are undoing the independent Commission which
00:48:15
was established in within our own state's constitution.
00:48:18
So again, the, the the litigation is stalling out.
00:48:22
We had, we had a number of state, you know, Republican
00:48:27
state legislators try to file a litigation and basically the
00:48:30
courts in California are saying it's not the technically a
00:48:34
constitutional violation because it's, you know, they didn't just
00:48:37
vote on it, pass and sign into the law.
00:48:39
They're putting it on to the on to the ballot.
00:48:41
They passed it, they signed it. But what they passed and signed
00:48:44
was to put it on to a ballot in the special election.
00:48:47
So that's that was the workaround for, you know, a
00:48:51
technical constitutional violation.
00:48:54
Well, it's an interesting precedent that they can set is I
00:48:56
guess if you get enough people to sign in a special election,
00:48:59
you can temporarily suspend parts of the California
00:49:02
Constitution. And I don't know if that's a
00:49:03
good precedent that they want to start setting.
00:49:05
Oh, it's. Absolutely horrible.
00:49:06
It's absolutely mutually assured destruction at the federal
00:49:09
level. Every state now has the
00:49:10
flexibility to do this for political purposes.
00:49:12
By the way, it may not just be a, you know, Democrat regime in
00:49:16
power in Sacramento in 20 years. So this can be reciprocated by
00:49:19
either party. So it's very dangerous.
00:49:22
It's not. It's not responsible, it's not
00:49:23
right. And, and frankly, it's not going
00:49:26
to pay off for Newsome. It's not going to pay off for
00:49:27
the Democrats in the end anyway. There was another question about
00:49:33
the California DMV and why can they send out ballots to anyone
00:49:38
who applies for driver's license because we're.
00:49:41
Yeah, let me let me clarify. If I was making a reference to
00:49:43
DMV registrations, there was a stretch of a few years and this
00:49:46
was rectified a few years ago where when you went to get your
00:49:49
driver's license or get your driver's license renewed towards
00:49:53
the end of your little on screen checkout thing, you know where
00:49:56
they're asking me to verify your address, verify your age, They
00:49:58
ask one. It defaulted to registering you
00:50:02
to vote. OK, so it didn't, It didn't for
00:50:05
a few years ask you to confirm that you're AUS citizen.
00:50:08
It didn't ask you to prove that you're AUS citizen and it would
00:50:12
still register you to vote. The next thing it did was it
00:50:16
would default to registering you as a Democrat.
00:50:20
That was just the default answer, right?
00:50:22
And again, it was sold under, hey, you know, there's no
00:50:26
malicious intent behind this. It's just how our system worked.
00:50:29
But the net effect of that was, you know, hundreds of thousands,
00:50:32
maybe probably millions of people were registered to vote,
00:50:37
some of which probably shouldn't have been registered to vote.
00:50:40
And, and many of whom were not even Democrats getting
00:50:43
registered to vote as Democrats. There was a period where a lot
00:50:45
of people got ballots. They were, they were Republicans
00:50:48
and their ballots showed them as Democrats and they would have to
00:50:50
go change that. So that's, you know, that that
00:50:54
is not how it is right now. The DMV has fixed this.
00:50:57
A lot of litigation around that, a lot of lawsuits as a result of
00:51:00
it. But there was a stretch of a few
00:51:02
years and I don't, I don't remember which years, but it
00:51:04
was, it was relatively recently where that was the case.
00:51:08
That's a convenient oopsie in One Direction.
00:51:11
It's one of those things, right? Yeah.
00:51:13
And it's a one way valve, right? It's hard to undo that, right?
00:51:16
It's hard to unring that bell when someone is, you know.
00:51:19
So again, it's plausible deniability and it breaks one
00:51:21
way. It's just an amazing
00:51:22
coincidence. It's amazing.
00:51:24
Always check your voter registration.
00:51:26
Everybody listening, if you yeah, check your voter
00:51:29
registration, make sure you're registered to vote for this
00:51:34
special election. Absolutely, absolutely good
00:51:37
point. Well, we're coming up on the
00:51:39
hour. Mike, I want to thank you for
00:51:41
coming on and and detailing everything so well for all of us
00:51:44
and for all of our listeners. Is there any final thoughts you
00:51:48
want to share with our listeners before we sign off for the
00:51:52
night? Well, I'll just echo Camille's,
00:51:55
you know, recommendations. Get smart on the issues.
00:51:58
Try to educate your your friends, family and neighbors.
00:52:00
Don't, don't make this about a Republican versus Democrat.
00:52:03
You know, don't make this about Newsome versus Trump.
00:52:05
This is right versus wrong. This is fairness inequality
00:52:10
versus, you know, a clear power grab by a very tyrannical
00:52:13
supermajority, right? That's not that's not me being
00:52:16
biased. The facts are all there.
00:52:18
We have to educate people on this issue because the
00:52:21
commercials will be gaslighting all of us shortly.
00:52:25
And so we've got we've got to make sure that we're doing
00:52:27
everything to get the vote out for this one.
00:52:29
And by the way, it's probably going to be, you know, pretty
00:52:30
low voter turn out. So these, these these midterms
00:52:34
and special elections in a special election, when I first
00:52:36
ran, I won by 10%, extremely low voter turn out.
00:52:40
It was in the presidential cycle where I won by only 333 votes.
00:52:43
Just just five months later. OK, So this will be lower, lower
00:52:47
voter turn out, which means that our impact, not just with our
00:52:51
one vote, but all of the votes that we influence and the people
00:52:53
around us absolutely makes a huge difference.
00:52:56
So this is This is why what you guys are doing is God's work.
00:52:58
And we need to, we need to continue more of this.
00:53:01
Right, Yep, I agree. It's, you know, there is stuff
00:53:05
coming up and I apologize, I said that this was the only
00:53:07
thing we're voting. There's a lot of stuff we're
00:53:09
voting on. There's a lot.
00:53:10
Of this midterm. Electric special election may it
00:53:13
may only be this from what I understand.
00:53:15
So this should be relatively focused which.
00:53:17
Would make it even focus on this.
00:53:19
All right, Mike, thank you so much for drawing.
00:53:21
Where can people go and find you if they want to follow more of
00:53:24
your thoughts and insights? Oh God.
00:53:26
I just googled my name and I think it's at Mike Garcia 1776
00:53:30
on, on X and some of the social media, but I'm the chair of the
00:53:34
America First Policy Institute, California division.
00:53:39
We, we, this is obviously the think tank that the
00:53:41
administration goes to for America First policies, but the
00:53:45
president's also paying attention to California.
00:53:48
And we've got to again, use, use these policies that have been
00:53:51
imparted on us by the, by Newsom and his friends up in Sacramento
00:53:54
as a, as a blueprint of what not to do.
00:53:56
And that's, that's going to be very important for the next 4
00:53:59
years. So appreciate the support we got
00:54:01
to keep fighting this good fight, got to save our country
00:54:02
and prevent it from turning in California.
00:54:05
Can I ask a final question? Sure, of course.
00:54:09
Do you plan to run again in politics?
00:54:14
No, I, I, you know, had the honor and blessing to serve at
00:54:18
the federal level for five years.
00:54:21
I have no interest in running percent.
00:54:23
There's no 0.0% chance of a strong conservative winning at
00:54:27
the state level right now. The governor's race is is
00:54:31
unobtainable for a while, and frankly, I don't have
00:54:33
aspirations to do it. I've done everything I had
00:54:36
wanted to do while in office. We did more in five years than
00:54:39
most did probably in 10 to 15 years.
00:54:41
I'm very proud of my team at this point, the only thing I
00:54:44
would consider from a future government services Secretary of
00:54:47
Defense. That's that's my sweet spot.
00:54:49
National security issues, all things military, all things
00:54:52
national security. So that that's probably the only
00:54:55
thing I'd be willing to make sacrifices and continued service
00:55:00
at the federal level at least. So, but I'll always be at the
00:55:03
nation's disposal. And you know, I've been willing
00:55:06
to give my life in in, in support of this beautiful
00:55:09
country for, for 49 years. And that's not going to change
00:55:11
anytime soon. So we got to keep fighting a
00:55:13
good fight. It's a good answer.
00:55:15
Camille's always trying to get the breaking news on whether or
00:55:17
not we can get a scoop on someone running or not.
00:55:20
Yeah, why not? Why not ask, right?
00:55:23
Why not? Steve Hilton is doing a bang up
00:55:25
job with his campaign. We should be getting behind him
00:55:28
and focusing our efforts. But California's tough right
00:55:31
now. But it's we got to fight that.
00:55:33
We got to fight that fight and be an opposition force as well.
00:55:36
100% agree. It's worth fighting for.
00:55:38
Well, thank you to everyone for tuning in.
00:55:40
Thanks for tuning in to Mike and Mike for being here.
00:55:43
I learned a lot. Those are my favorite type of
00:55:45
guests when I learn a lot. If you want to support the show,
00:55:48
make sure you like share, subscribe, review all that stuff
00:55:51
and the best thing you can do to support the show that is 100%
00:55:55
free is share it with someone else who you would think would
00:55:57
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00:56:01
later. Everybody take.
00:56:03
Care guys.