The Pol Who Wants to Replace Nancy Pelosi
Dear John,
Millions of Americans who have cultivated their hatred of Nancy Pelosi for decades may soon find they actually miss her. The 85‑year‑old “Speaker Emerita” announced her retirement from Congress last week, but the unfortunately named Scott Wiener — a longtime state lawmaker from Pelosi’s California neighborhood — was already prepared to seize the day. Wiener said last month that he’d run to replace Pelosi in 2026 whether she was running or not.
Like a stolid Soviet leader atop Lenin’s Tomb, Pelosi had quietly signaled before her retirement announcement that she’ll likely endorse someone — maybe anyone — else to succeed her. At a recent rally for Governor Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 redistricting effort, reporters noted that Pelosi was joined by just one local official, Connie Chan, the San Francisco supervisor who has said she plans to run in the event of Pelosi’s now-official retirement.
But whomever Pelosi endorses, she will not descend fairylike to tap the brow of Scott Wiener.
It’s not that he lacks the table stakes. A sanitized, family-friendly Wiener biography would show that he’s a Harvard‑trained lawyer and longtime San Francisco resident who began his public career on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2010. There, he built his reputation as a progressive advocate on issues ranging from civil rights to public health. In 2016, San Franciscans promoted him to the California State Senate. As with Pelosi herself, the state’s government unions, especially firefighters, love Wiener.
But in the legislature, Wiener has established a record that might have given Pelosi a case of the fantods. Of course, Wiener’s success there is not his alone. He has operated in a political environment shaped by Governor Newsom, progressive state legislators, and a San Francisco electorate that repeatedly sends him to office.
But the record he’s built there is entirely his own — a made-for-Netflix tragicomic collection of utterly bonkers legislation that would almost certainly weigh on Democratic candidates everywhere, offering proof that their party cannot be trusted around children.
In 2019, Wiener authored SB 145: “Ending Discrimination Against LGBTQ People Regarding Sex Offender Registration.” The bill amended California’s sex offender registry law so that judges have discretion in cases involving sex between minors as young as 14 and adults within ten years of that. Wiener claimed that he was merely bringing parity to the way in which judges handled cases involving sex between straight adults and their under-18 sexual partners. He might more reasonably have simply said there should be no judicial discretion when it comes to adults, whatever their gender or self-declared “identity,” having sex with kids.
Wiener’s SB 107 made California a sanctuary state for kids seeking medical support for their desire to transition, regardless of where they live in the United States or what their parents say. Team Wiener says the law, which Newsom signed in 2022, protects vulnerable kids from bad parents and regressive red-state policies. You might say it violates parental rights, encourages runaways, and makes those kids vulnerable to abuse, including sex trafficking. In 2023, Wiener championed SB 407, which required foster homes to provide explicit support for LGBTQ youth and regular assessments of their putative needs.
But treating kids as adults — and intruding on parental rights in the process — is Wiener’s brand. His 2023 SB 866 would have lowered the age of consent for vaccine treatments to 12. Innumerate but politically astute, Wiener called that bill the “Teens Choose Vaccines Act.” When the bill stalled, Wiener raised the age of consent to 15 to attract more supporters. In one of his rare legislative defeats, Wiener pulled the bill.
But that same year, he cosponsored Assembly Bill 1955. Legislators called it the “Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act.” It’s an acronym that states with precision the opposite of what’s true. In reality, AB 1955 prohibited teachers and school officials from revealing to parents their children’s requests for gender-related name, pronoun, and dress changes; their participation in sex-segregated activities; and their entry into spaces where they would otherwise be banned because of their biology. Some critics call it the “Parental Exclusion Act.” Newsom signed it anyhow and then, perhaps thinking better — but without any sense of irony — told the late Charlie Kirk that he found the idea of boys competing in girls’ sports “deeply unfair.”
Wiener’s zaniness isn’t limited to the stupefying theater of capitol politics. In 2022, monkeypox — a virulent, flu-like virus that spreads through physical contact — ravaged San Francisco’s gay population. The entire state of California reported 346 cases, but 64 percent of those were in San Francisco alone. Public health experts, including the CDC, begged the city to shut down its annual “Up Your Alley” gay festival. Wiener supported the call for a “state of emergency,” with all the additional funding that would bring his district. But he boldly called for everyone to keep calm and carry on with the parades, street performances, and casual sex. “Lecturing people not to have sex isn’t a public health strategy,” Wiener said. “It didn’t stop HIV — it made it worse — and won’t stop monkeypox. What will work is vaccination, testing and education.”
Among Wiener’s greatest legislative hits, one is suddenly in the spotlight. SB 357 (2022), Wiener’s “Safer Streets for All Act,” repealed California’s loitering-with-intent statute. Historically used to break up prostitution rings from the bottom up (no pun intended), the law has drawn national attention for producing a boom in minor sex trafficking in downtown Los Angeles. A recent New York Times Magazine report recounted young girls walking openly on a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street, which forms a trafficking corridor nicknamed “the Blade.” The report highlighted Wiener’s bill among several factors that boosted sex trafficking on the Blade. Wiener said SB 357 would stop police from harassing black and brown women and transgender men merely for their manner of dress or such factors as time and place and behavior.
“But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them,” the Times reports. “Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said.”
Whatever you think of Pelosi, she’s a seasoned strategist and likely considers Wiener’s record a drag on the Democratic Party’s prospects. His early announcement has forced Pelosi’s hand. Endorsing him now would tie her legacy to a polarizing figure. If vulnerability management is among a party leader’s chief considerations, Wiener comes with something like the surgeon general’s warning on a pack of smokes.
— by CPC CEO Will Swaim. An earlier version of this article was published by National Review.
|
|
Radio Free California #417: Laundering Lunacy
On this week's podcast with CPC CEO Will Swaim and CPC board member David Bahsen: Following his big Prop 50 win, Governor Gavin Newsom hit the road, denouncing the Democrats’ deal to end the federal shutdown, accepting the thanks of worshipful Democrats in Houston, and appearing as the highest-ranking American representative at the U.N.’s climate talks in Brazil. Listen now.
|
|
|
The Regulatory Burden that Prevents Abundance
California small businesses face a crushing maze of overlapping federal, state and county regulations — often contradictory and always costly. CPC's Edward Ring explains that, until lawmakers embrace real deregulation, all the political talk about “abundance” remains empty rhetoric. Read the article.
|
|
Boring Company May Have a Viable Alternative for California Urban Transit
Las Vegas is pioneering a new form of underground transportation using The Boring Company’s tunnels and Tesla vehicles. CPC Visiting Fellow Marc Joffe explains why California cities interested in a cost-effective solution for surface congestion should be watching Las Vegas closely. Read now.
|
|
|
|
|
|
