Newsom’s Outrageous Death Row Commutations Offer Larger Lesson About ‘Progressive’ Governance

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s sudden mass decree to effectively end the death penalty in California is not just an injustice, it is a profound demonstration of how the Left governs.

On Wednesday, Newsom announced that he would commute the sentence of every death row inmate in California. They will now all serve a life sentences without the possibility of parole.

So, after nearly eight years in office, Newsom finally decided to issue a blanket commutation to prisoners on death row in California prisons. It was remarkably similar to former President Joe Biden’s last-second commutation of the death sentences of federal prisoners.

But this one is much larger in scale. Biden commuted the sentences of 37 people, Newsom is commuting the sentences of 548 inmates. Many have been convicted of crimes so evil they can hardly be imagined.

Killers like Richard Allen Davis, who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas, and Cary Stayner, who murdered four women near Yosemite National Park, are among the more infamous villains given a reprieve. But they are just a few among many. Just read through this list of exclusively Bay Area death row inmates Newsom threw a lifeline to and you’ll get the picture.

Newsom sold this last-minute act before leaving office as a morally righteous end to a long-thought-out journey.

“After nearly 30 years in public office, I have come to understand the limits of what government can justly accomplish,” Newsom wrote in a statement. “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.”

Whatever one can say about the merits of the death penalty as a form of justice, it’s awfully rich for Newsom to say he’s against something that “undermines the foundations of our legal system” while pulling off an eleventh-hour mass commutation he promised voters he wouldn’t do.

The death penalty is an understandably contentious subject. If the people of California want it eliminated, so be it. But the people have spoken in its favor. California voters have had several chances to end the death penalty, and each time it’s been put up to a vote—most recently in 2012 and 2016—they decided by significant margins not to do so. Courts and juries have gone through the process of using it to mete out justice.

Newsom didn’t just decide that one sentence or another should be commuted, he just upended the law entirely.

When the people spoke, they said they wanted the death penalty. When the people spoke, they said they wanted the death penalty. Newsom acknowledged he was against it but while campaigning said that he would bow to voters on the matter.

Once in office, Newsom put the whole system in limbo by issuing a mass moratorium on the death penalty.

Now, as he heads out of office and no longer has to answer to voters for his actions, he is effectively saying: Silly little people, I had no intention of honoring the laws you made.

Like Biden, he avoided acting on the death penalty when it might be politically inconvenient but ultimately gave the Left’s activist class what they wanted. No doubt Newsom is hoping this issue will be long forgotten if he ever decides to seek a higher office.

There is a very serious lesson to be learned here beyond what happened to California’s death penalty. It was notable that even during the midterm blue tsunami the policies and issues conservatives care about largely won, and in some cases won big.

When it comes strictly to policy, conservative ideas are good and popular, even in the deepest of blue states.

However, when Democrats and the Left are in power, they have absolutely no intention of upholding those laws. They will stymie them with bureaucratic red tape, appoint judges to strike them down whatever their merits, and sometimes simply make decrees to upend them. The parchment barriers to the raw exercise of power are in some sense thinner than ever, because the American Left will tear through them without a second thought.

Democracy to them is what Democrats say and want, no more and no less. And when they take those actions to defy voters, they’ll be praised by the left-wing media for their bravery.

There’s a lot going on in the country as the political landscape is being reshaped by the midterm elections, so a last second outrage by the California governor is easy to overlook. But it’s still an outrage and an insult to voters, though perhaps in California there are a fair number of voters practically begging to be ignored and insulted.

But Newsom’s decision absolutely offers a lesson in what we can expect from other Democrats in the days ahead.

Get ready to accept their rules, whether you like them or not.

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