Organizers of the Recall Gavin Newsom 2020 movement drove their 24-foot bus to Sutter County on Oct. 21 to support Assemblymen Kevin Kiley (R-Roseville) and James Gallagher (R-Sacramento) in their lawsuit against the governor.
While Kiley was making his opening arguments inside the Sutter County Courthouse, Recall Gavin Newsom advocates gathered about 400 signatures for their petition to unseat Newsom while parked outside the courthouse.
“The truck opens like a serving counter,” said Mike Netter, co-founder of Recall Gavin Newsom 2020. “People drove from as far away as Ventura and Yuba City, which is about seven hours, just to have a presence at the hearing, not even to get in the courtroom. They did that because they are angry at Gov. Newsom and want to support the assemblymen’s lawsuit.”
Recall Gavin Newsom co-founders and a volunteer use the truck to gather signatures
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Assemblymen Kiley and Gallagher sued Newsom over Executive Order N-67-20, which mandated a host of rules related to the Nov. 3 elections, such as the number of precincts, planning the election and how many days [the] polls must open prior to the election, the Southern California Record previously reported.
“The state of emergency that we are under is unprecedented in several ways,” Kiley said in his suit. “The first is the duration. The second is the sheer volume of executive orders that have been unilaterally issued, which is 57 executive orders changing more than 400 newly enacted California laws and the third distinguishing unprecedented feature is the kind of power that has been exercised. Both sides appear to agree that the executive order in question N-67-20 was an exercise of legislative power by the governor.”
As previously reported, with 2 million petition signatures by the Nov. 17 deadline and a public vote in March 2021, a recall could require the removal of Newsom before his term limit is completed.
Recall Gavin Newsom founders have gathered about 35% of the required signatures.
“We have legally filed in court for a three-month extension, which we're pretty sure we're going to get,” Netter told the Southern California Record. “With the state in lockdown right now, it's hard to even get into the registrar's office to drop the signatures off. California is kind of complicated right now.”
In addition to their petition truck, the privately funded Recall Gavin Newsom initiative maintains 400 signing locations and 25,000 volunteers, according to Netter, and 3,500 of those volunteers are active every weekend.
Some of those volunteers entered the courtroom to hear Kiley’s argument during the hearing last week.
“There are two options before the court today,” Kiley publicly told Sutter County Superior Court Judge Sarah Heckman. “If California law is as broad as the defendant argues in this case, affording unrestricted police powers and a plenary authority to govern, then it too must be struck down for the same reason that the Michigan law was. If on the other hand, California's law is narrower than Michigan's, as we argue, then the governor's order in this case and many of his orders were not authorized by the Emergency Services Act or by any statute and should be struck down for that reason.”