SACRAMENTO, Calif. — With COVID-19 cases trending downward in the Golden State, there's a renewed push to end California's State of Emergency.
This is something that was first enacted back in March of 2020 when the pandemic first began to give Gov. Newsom more power to stop the spread.
On Tuesday, Feb. 15, the state plans to end its mask mandate.
Before that happens, Republican lawmakers, including Republican Assemblymember Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, pushed to make a motion asking for this issue to go to the Assembly floor for a vote through ACR 46.
Leslie Gielow Jacobs, a professor at the McGeorge School of Law, says the State of Emergency allows the governor to do things like issue rules and mandates, the color-coded tier system and granting contracts that would typically go through an agency for approval.
It also frees up the ability to get more federal funding.
"Often, the governor chooses to keep those in effect, because it gives the possibility of getting things like federal aid, it makes it a little bit easier to do that," Jacobs said. "So the Legislature would have to think about those things when it thinks about ending the emergency, but absolutely, it has the power to do it."
Kiley first introduced ACR 46, a concurrent resolution which would bring the State of Emergency to end, terminating the emergency powers granted to Gov. Newsom as a result of that proclamation.
"We have seen that the response to COVID-19, is handled better by local communities, as opposed to the state simply dictating everything, for 40 million people, really one person, the governor dictating things," Kiley said. "But we've now reached the point where it's just become a point of absurdity, maintaining the State of Emergency."
Jacobs says because this is a concurrent resolution, the Legislature does have the ability to exercise its concurrent power to terminate it.
Kiley says this is also timely because California is hosting the Super Bowl on Sunday.
"California is about to host the Super Bowl, this coming weekend, one of the biggest events in the world, we have 70,000 fans in a stadium, and yet, we're saying this is all going on during a State of Emergency," Kiley said. "Clearly, any predicate for there to be a State of Emergency has passed."
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