Assembly members Chad Mayes and Rocky Chavez voted to raise your gas taxes by up to 72 cents a gallon, starting January 1, 2020—in the infamous cap and trade bill. Where do THEY want the money to go—roads, streets, freeways? Nope upwards of $500 million a year to the choo choo to nowhere. Now there have joined with Arnold Schwarzenegger—who supported Hilary Clinton for President and with AB 32 killed California jobs and raised the cost of living in the former Golden State, to destroy what is left of the Republican Party in California.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!““We are here because the soul of our great Republican Party that inspired each and every single one of us is worth fighting for,” said former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the keynote speaker in east L.A. at the first meeting of New Way California.
The last Republican elected to California’s top office has long called for the party to moderate its tone and reach out to the state’s diverse pool of voters, who have increasingly turned away from the GOP over the past two decades.
“Today we are the Titanic after it hit the iceberg, but before the last bit of the ship submerged,” Schwarzenegger said, drawing chuckles. “But unlike the Titanic, we might be able to save Leonardo DiCaprio before he goes under.”
Mayes, Rocky and Arnold are doing the work of the Democrat Party, while claiming to be Republicans. Too bad their morality and ethics do not allow them to be truthfully about their goals—to defeat Republicans in the November election. Question, if re-elected will Mayes stay in the Republican Party? If elected to Congress, will Chavez register as a Democrat?
By Ben Bradford, Capital Public Radio, 4/19/18
With the June primary approaching, there is a fight underway for the identity of the California Republican Party.
“We need bold ideas,” President Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, told cheering GOP activists at the state party convention last fall. “Ideas like Donald Trump ran on, like build the wall, right? Protect our southern border. Reduce legal immigration.”
Six months later, and 25 miles north, Republican Assemblyman Chad Mayes led a smaller gathering to offer an opposite message.
“For us to be able to grow and expand, we have to move beyond this nationalist model,” said Mayes, elected in 2014 to represent parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. “We’ve got to start having conversations with folks of all different colors, creeds, sexual orientation. We have to go to folks who we don’t traditionally go to.”
Bannon gave the convention’s keynote address in a plush hotel ballroom room in Anaheim. Mayes organized his event at a youth center in Boyle Heights, a low-income, largely-Latino neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles. About 200 people sat on folding chairs laid out across the center’s basketball court, their backs to the tattered ropes of a boxing ring.
The contrasting scenes featured contrasting solutions to the same problem.
Behind Bannon, the convention’s backdrop read, “Electing Republicans in a Blue State” — a testament to how much ground the GOP has lost to Democrats in California over the past two decades.
While state party officials and activists have aligned themselves with President Trump’s brand of conservatism to tap the enthusiasm of their base, Mayes wants to broaden the party’s appeal leftward, by taking stances that run counter to Trump’s and Bannon’s. Advocates for the two approaches are at odds.
Some want to change the tune
“We are here because the soul of our great Republican Party that inspired each and every single one of us is worth fighting for,” said former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the keynote speaker in east L.A. at the first meeting of New Way California.
The last Republican elected to California’s top office has long called for the party to moderate its tone and reach out to the state’s diverse pool of voters, who have increasingly turned away from the GOP over the past two decades.
“Today we are the Titanic after it hit the iceberg, but before the last bit of the ship submerged,” Schwarzenegger said, drawing chuckles. “But unlike the Titanic, we might be able to save Leonardo DiCaprio before he goes under.”
Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2010 and their share of registered voters has fallen to about 25 percent. Only 16 percent of Latinos, the state’s largest racial or ethnic demographic, are registered Republicans, according to a 2017 study by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Mayes says appealing to those groups requires finding compromises with Democrats — rather than operating as an opposition party — and moving away from divisive social debates over illegal immigration, affirmative action and same-sex marriage, which have coincided with an erosion in support from Latino, Asian and LGBT voters over the past two decades.
“We tried for so long the yelling and screaming and telling people that don’t agree with us 100 percent of the time that they’re taking this country down the road to hell,” Mayes said. “And it seemed as Republicans were doing that that our numbers were getting worse and worse and worse.”
Instead, he wants to focus on poverty and the state’s record income inequality, making the case that taxes and regulations are to blame for California’s high cost of living.
That pitch found traction with Ruben Guerra, CEO of the Latin Business Association in Los Angeles and a Democrat who voted for Schwarzenegger.
“Some of these regulations and some of these laws, even I say c’mon guys, really? Wake up,” Guerra said. “I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but now I’m not loyal to that anymore.”
But Democratic and Republican party officials downplay the ability of New Way to catch on.
“I think this is kind of ridiculous,” said Eric Bauman, the chairman of the California Democratic Party. “Do I think it’s the right way to go if I was the chair of the Republican Party? Sure. But the people who are the activists in the Republican Party and the people who are the elected officials in the Republican Party, this is not where they are.”
Ideologies collide
Mayes and his party have already clashed heads over their competing approaches and platforms. Last year, when Mayes was the leader of Republicans in the state Assembly, he struck a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown. He and six other assemblymembers provided key votes to pass an extension of the climate change program, cap-and-trade.
Mayes describes it as a practical vote, which gave Republicans leverage to negotiate other tax cuts and credits in the deal, and allows businesses, manufacturers and oil companies to cut emissions in their preferred manner. Those industries all supported the deal.
He joined Brown for a celebratory press conference after the vote. That infuriated party activists, who argue the vote raised costs on consumers, especially fuel prices.
“I think the coup de grâce for Chad’s standing in the party was the open embrace of the governor at the press conference,” says Harmeet Dhillon, the Republican National Committeewoman from California. “And I think that really caused the rift in the party. He didn’t see it. He thought it was his own party to do with it what he wanted even though his view was a minority view.”
Dhillon led the successful effort to oust Mayes as Assembly Republican leader — he stepped down a month after the vote.
This election, Mayes faces two Republican primary challengers from his right, both challenging him due to the cap-and-trade vote. A local activist group, the Redlands Tea Party Patriots, has endorsed one of them, Andrew Kotyuk, a San Jacinto councilman, while urging the other, retired Palm Springs police chief Gary Jeandron, to drop out.
The local Republican Party committees in his district and the state party also voted for Mayes’s resignation as party leader.
Now, Dhillon describes the New Way group as “Democrats-lite,” who are diverging from the values of the party. “We have to hold onto the seats that we have, but with a certain branding,” Dhillon said.
Rather than compromise with Democrats, she says state lawmakers should heighten their opposition.
“I think the tone of all of our legislators in Sacramento is very measured and frankly too tame,” Dhillon said. “I would make their tone more strident if anything on what the Democrats are doing to destroy the state.”
GOP seats up for grabs
The old and New Way approaches will face off in the June primary elections. Democrats are targeting long-held Republican congressional seats in Orange County and northern San Diego County.
One race, in particular, will be demonstrative. Long-time Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who funded the recall that led to Schwarzenegger’s election as governor and hounded President Obama as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, faces poor polling numbers and is retiring from a seat that was once solidly the GOP’s. The race to replace him includes several well-funded Democrats, including environmental attorney Mike Levin, former nonprofit CEO Sara Jacob and retired Marine colonel Doug Applegate, who lost to Issa in the last general election by a mere 1,600 votes.
On the Republican side, Board of Equalization member Diane Harkey has endorsements from the area’s prominent conservative, including Issa and the county Republican parties,while San Diego County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Kristin Gaspar is another prominent, conservative Republican who entered the race late.
Straddling the middle is Republican Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, one of New Way’s founding members.
It could be an early test of which kind of Republican remains viable with California voters, if any.
During Arnold’s governorship he began the destruction of the Republican brand. In 2006, I worked in Orange and San Diego counties as Mimi Walters District Director. When Arnold pushed and signed into law policies that added Cap and Trade regulations the office phones started ringing with furious constituents saying they were leaving the republican party, and they did. Rocky Chavez, Chad Mayes and Arnold are self serving rebels who will destroy the country if allowed to continue in elective office.
Worse, I believe. Many Republicans threw in the towel and began moving out of state.
Not only did they leave the CA GOP, for the most part they left CA……
as did I.
The progressive democrat socialist party of the USA is liberal politics at it’s worst! “Liberalism” requires the rejection of facts, truth, and reality.
All 3 of them should go to gas pumps and sign under the prices, “Thanks to Chavez, Mayes and Schwarzenegger with the others that crossed over into RINO land.
It’s the treachery of people like Schwarzenegger, Mayes, and Munger that has destroyed the Republican Party in California. Their treason, along with the massive voter fraud engineered by the Democrats, has ensured that California will never again be a free State. It will continue to spiral into the Abyss. Probably better to split it into three states. That might free some people from the clutches of the Fascist Left.
Chavez is useless except for photo ops
Democrates are nothing but CORRUPT TRASH….Throw these assipes out in Nov 2018…..
The State of Jefferson is sounding better by the minute………..
With literally thousands of bill each year, most by Dems – it is impossible for regular working stiffs to follow all of them. As cited, AB 32 was probably read by 1/10th of the population. THIS is the way they get this crap through…… Soon enough we will be the Union of Soviet Socialist Californians……..U.S.S.C.. but then again, maybe we are already there…..
The State of Jefferson is a potential new home for California’s fleeing middle class and former California pensioners who want to live a better life under better government with lower taxes.
Its economic viability is virtually a certainty if the current residents are willing to accept conservative to moderate “refugees”.
It looks as if “Reform California’s” petition to repeal the 82 cent a gallon gas tax will fall short of the necessary signatures required to make the ballot. There is very few days left to find someone outside a store and sign the damn thing. It seems incredulous that 585,000 signatures couldn’t be obtained. Are people really that deeply asleep?
The CA flag will be redesigned, with the Golden Bear being replaced by a Zombie.
Actually the BOGUS Travis Allen signature gathering effort was indeed a dismal failure. Allen was just using it to promote his candidacy for governor.
BUT there is a second effort that has ALREADY gathered over 500,000 paid and volunteer signatures — a different, better prop to require ALL such “gas tax” measures to be approved by the voters — while repealing the last increase.
The volunteer effort is led by San Diego KOGO talk show host Carl DeMaio, along with Ken and Jer in LA. A separate professional petition circulator is also hard at work. It will be close, but it looks like it WILL qualify for the ballot.
http://act.reformcalifornia.org/petitions/cartax/CApetition/