After burning $340 million in his 2020 presidential bid, which ended in failure, billionaire Tom Steyer has spent more than $120 million in hopes of becoming the next governor of California. Thanks to fortuitously timed reporting about former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s extramarital activities, Swalwell’s latest investment looks like it may pay off.
The state’s largest government union, the California Teachers Association, waited only three days after pulling its endorsement from Swalwell to endorse Steyer. Now, armed with hundreds of millions of his own dollars as well as hundreds more from government unions, Steyer is poised to cruise toward at least a second-place finish in the June 2 primary, and from there to an easy general election victory in a Democrat-dominated state.
What are California voters getting from their new billionaire overlord?
Under fire from former Rep. Katie Porter, Steyer’s closest Democratic opponent, for his hedge fund’s investment in private prisons that do business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Steyer recently issued an extensive immigration policy statement embracing the Democratic Party’s most radical open borders policies. For any moderate Democrats hoping that the party and its aspirants for office learned from former President Joe Biden’s disastrous border crisis, Steyer’s immigration plan was an epic disappointment.
Not only has he promised not to cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement if elected, and advocated the abolition of ICE, but Steyer is also promising to arrest, imprison, and prosecute ICE agents and “their leadership within the Department of Homeland Security.”
This is absurd. California Highway Patrol officers will not pull their guns on equally armed ICE agents and attempt to detain them. If they did, there would be blood. Even Steyer cannot pretend to be that stupid.
But he has also promised to spend millions of dollars on illegal immigrants to help them avoid deportation, including money for “legal defense infrastructure,” “funding for more attorneys,” and public information campaigns to teach illegal immigrants how to avoid the legal consequences of their illegal presence in the United States. Thousands of law-abiding middle-class families are leaving California every year because of high taxes and housing costs, but Steyer’s top priority is to spend millions of tax dollars to make sure illegal immigrants can stay.
Steyer is no stranger to California politics. He has been an active spender, pushing climate change priorities in the state for over a decade. His activism is a major reason California has the highest electricity and gas prices in the continental United States. There is no energy regulation or gas tax that Steyer has not supported, and he is not backing down from any of these past positions.
Say what you will about Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), but he consistently resisted his party’s left-wing when it came to imposing a wealth tax on California. He understood that such a tax would just chase wealth out of Silicon Valley and stanch new wealth creation. Because it falls hardest on founders whose assets are tied up in illiquid company stock, a wealth tax gives the people most capable of building a great company good reason to do so somewhere else.
DEMOCRATS’ TWO-TIERED JUSTICE SYSTEM FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Steyer does not appear to care about that. While he has not endorsed the Billionaire Tax proposition that the SEIU is pushing to get on this November’s ballot, he has endorsed past Democratic Party wealth taxes in Sacramento and made higher taxes on billionaires and corporations the centerpiece of his campaign.
Californians are fleeing high taxes, high energy costs, and a hostile business climate. Steyer’s answer is higher taxes, more spending, and more illegal immigration. His election would be great news for government unions and illegal immigrants who feed off taxpayer dollars, and it would make the state far less affordable and profitable for everyone else.