During a press gaggle on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) spoke about his plans for congressional redistricting in his state and Trump's push to get the Texas legislature to redistrict congressional seats.
00:00Thank you for your patience. Governor, you alluded earlier to Speaker Johnson, maybe not being speaker anymore in this conversation that's been going on about redistricting.
00:10That's good. Yeah. It sounds like you're looking for if you potentially wanted to reopen this conversation about drawing house.
00:18Which I don't. Goes to your question. These guys, look, you got it. I don't. It's not what I want to do.
00:26Let me explain it. Because I'm going to validate where you're going.
00:34I was one of. At the time, I don't recall. This may be overstated, but I thought I was one of a few handful of Democrats in elected office that supported independent redistricting when it first was promoted.
00:48I support independent redistricting. I think it should be done at a national level.
00:51At the same time, I also am mindful to next year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of this great country.
01:02And I'm very fearful about what's going on in this country.
01:08When Donald Trump calls in to the Texas legislature along the lines of the phone calls he made saying, find me some votes in Georgia and says, find me more five more seats in Texas.
01:22They're playing by a different set of rules. They can't win by the traditional game, so they want to change the game.
01:30We can act taller than now. We could sit on the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be.
01:35Or we can recognize the existential nature. That is this moment. And so it took me a moment to reconcile my own feelings, very proud of the work Governor Schwarzenegger and others did on that.
01:52It's a national model. Right now, there may not be a nation to model.
02:00And so my response to that, I want to finish because it's the question you're asking, has been to explore what we can do about it.
02:09And that's exactly what I've tasked my team. And there are two alternatives if you're interested.
02:12You can call a special session. And we can move forward. And we're exploring that. And we've had real conversations about that.
02:24There are also a number of legal experts that have come to us exploring an alternative to that through an urgency measure.
02:31The legislature can move forward with new maps as it relates to federal districts.
02:39And that is option that is also being considered. And both of those are being advanced in real time, not only with members of the legislature, but others that are interested because they feel the same pressure as I do about the existential threat of what Donald Trump and some of these Republican states are trying to do.
03:00Forgive me to ask a question to this. I'm having a hard time squaring how that does still either of those options, not fundamentally bump up against the will of the voters who approved an independent...
03:11Well, it's pretty easy. The option one is, by definition, reconciles that.
03:17By definition, because it would require those same voters to make a determination on the basis of current facts.
03:24We can be stubborn, you know, and just assume everything's status quo ante.
03:33I mean, they've changed... There's no... There used to be three co-equal branches of government. One's completely disappeared in real time.
03:41The rule of law is being challenged every single day. Just ask all the mass people running around here.
03:45People are disappearing. Quite literally, a word you hear all the time, people are quite literally disappearing with no due process, no rights.
03:51The courts take forever to advance the cause of any reconciliation.
03:57You've got a president who's talking about recalling folks and judges he disagrees with, or just completely dismissing.
04:04He runs right up to the edge on the rule of law on decisions that are made by the courts, and whether or not it works for him, or decides on a whim.
04:13Nah, it won't.
04:14So things have changed, and so that would be the argument I would make, but again, I don't come to this lightly.
04:22This is not a point of... It's just a point of rationalization, and I hope a realization for everyone else.
04:30It's... Everything has changed, and it's changing in real time, and I'm not going to be the guy that said I could have, would have, should have.
04:37I'm not going to be passive at this moment.
04:39I'm not going to look at my kids in the eyes and say I was a little timid, or I didn't like the word that this guy used.
04:46I'm just not going to be that guy.
04:48I'm sorry.
04:49What more evidence do you need?
04:50I mean, everything that dams happened the last six months in this part of the state.
04:55So that's my approach, and to the extent that others share it, by definition, it requires the consent of our representative body, the legislature.
05:06And they'll make that determination, and if they choose the path of a ballot initiative, the people of this state will decide for themselves in the spirit that brought you that law in the first place.
