Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, flanked by Gov. Jerry Brown, left, and California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols, speaks during a news conference in Sacramento, May 1, 2018.
Jerry Brown never got very far in his three runs for president (1976, 1980, and 1992), but he’s managed to tee up a number of prospects for Joe Biden’s Cabinet. It was Brown, during his second go-round (2011–2019) as California’s governor, who appointed Rep. Xavier Becerra to replace state Attorney General Kamala Harris when Harris was elected to the Senate. It was Brown, also during his second governorship, who put anti-sweatshop activist Julie Su in charge of the state agency that monitors adherence to the state’s labor laws. And during his first stint as governor (1975–1983), it was Brown who appointed environmental activist Mary Nichols to wage the first concerted state campaign to reduce air pollution, then appointed her again to that post (head of the California Air Resources Board) when he returned to the governor’s office in 2011.
Today, Becerra is Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Su is one of the finalists in contention for labor secretary, and even if she doesn’t get that appointment, she’d be the best possible option to crack down on labor law–violating employers as head of the department’s Wage and Hour Division. Nichols has been reported to be the front-runner to head Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency.
While working under Brown, Becerra, Su, and Nichols all amassed stellar records. As attorney general, Becerra is best known for his more than 100 lawsuits that have contested the Trump administration’s efforts to put in place anti-abortion policies and to scrap the Affordable Care Act, the DACA program, California’s auto emission standards, and a host of other statutes. Perhaps more important, though, are the actions he took in non-Trump-related matters. As my colleague David Dayen has noted, Becerra sued the Sutter hospital chain, which had purchased so many Northern California hospitals that it was approaching monopoly status, for abusing its power by compelling insurance companies to pay its disproportionately high charges for medical services if they wanted Sutter’s business. Becerra sued Sutter and compelled it to fork over a $575 million fine and have its business practices monitored for ten years. Though he’s headed for HHS, not the Justice Department, Becerra has created a model for how Biden’s DOJ antitrust division should conduct itself.
Other journalists have followed Becerra’s career more closely than I, but I was surely among the first to encounter him. In 1990, when California’s term-limit laws first took effect, a host of state legislative seats fell open for the first time in many decades, and Becerra, then a legislative aide to a state senator, opted to run for the Assembly in a district encompassing downtown Los Angeles and some neighborhoods immediately to its north and east. Like most L.A. districts, this one was overwhelmingly Democratic, and whoever won the June primary was assured of victory in November’s general election. At the time, however, the Los Angeles Times didn’t endorse in party primaries, which created an opening for the LA Weekly, for which I’d recently gone to work as, effectively, the political editor, to become more of a voice among the city’s increasingly liberal readers.
So that spring, we invited in a mob of legislative candidates for endorsement interviews. The old-guard Latino Democratic machine sent in a distinctly unimpressive candidate, and later, we met with Becerra, who, having impressed us with his intelligence and his overall (though not down-the-line) liberalism, was our clear choice. He won the Assembly race and two years later won the congressional seat from which Ed Roybal—who’d held it since 1962—was stepping down.
Since the Weekly had in some modest degree helped jump-start Becerra’s career, I followed his congressional career somewhat closely. He made a sufficiently good impression that he was appointed to one of the key House “juice” committees (that is, committees with real jurisdiction over dollar-and-cents issues, whose members are therefore able to raise substantial campaign contributions). Becerra became the first Latino to serve on Ways and Means, where he promoted a number of progressive policies on health issues in particular. (He served on the Health Subcommittee.) However, Ways and Means is also the key House committee on trade policy, and until recent years it’s been a bastion of support for free trade. Becerra swallowed the free-trade orthodoxy, voting for both NAFTA in 1993 and permanent normal trade relations with China in 2001, even though a majority of his House Democratic colleagues opposed both measures.
Also in 2001, Becerra jumped into the race for another open seat—that of mayor of Los Angeles. (As this was an odd-year election, it didn’t compel him to abandon his congressional seat.) If there’s one group of public officials of whom Angelenos are completely unaware, however, it’s L.A.-area congresspersons: The county has roughly two dozen of them, and unless they’re caught in a car chase, they hardly ever appear on local newscasts. Adding to his difficulties, Becerra was anything but a magnetic presence at campaign forums, and he was soon eclipsed on the campaign trail by Antonio Villaraigosa, who was to the stump manner born.
Though he’s headed for HHS, not the Justice Department, Becerra has created a model for how Biden’s DOJ antitrust division should conduct itself.
Like most center-left Democrats, Becerra has moved leftward on a range of issues in recent years, and health care was always an issue on which he took progressive stances—including backing Medicare for All (though as Biden’s HHS secretary, his job would be to defend and, when possible, expand the ACA). Had he been nominated for U.S. trade representative, as he almost was under Obama, I’d have grave reservations. But I don’t doubt he’ll be a force for good at HHS.
EVEN BEFORE JERRY BROWN had appointed her California’s labor commissioner in 2011, Julie Su had made her mark defending exploited workers. Su is a founder of Sweatshop Watch, and the former litigation director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California. In the 1990s, she helped uncover the enslavement of nearly 100 Thai women who were being held and compelled to produce garments—for no pay whatsoever—in the L.A. suburb of El Monte.
As California’s labor commissioner for the duration of Brown’s third and fourth terms as governor, Su focused on the exploitation of workers in the fissured economy. She brought and won numerous lawsuits against the port trucking companies that mislabeled their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, forcing the companies to pay the many thousands of dollars to their drivers that they’d cheated them out of. She also focused on and penalized other cheating employers in the garment, restaurant, and car wash industries. In 2015, I wrote a Prospect article that documented Su’s efforts on behalf of the port truckers and car wash workers (who’d been “paid” only in tips) of Los Angeles—both largely immigrant workforces for whom she used her power not just to litigate on their behalf but, by exerting that pressure, to help them organize, too.
When Gavin Newsom succeeded Brown as governor, he appointed Su to his Cabinet as labor secretary, where she’s continued her aggressive advocacy for the millions of California workers who struggle to survive in the state’s massive low-wage economy. Recently, her department has been taken to task for its not-always-accurate distribution of unemployment checks, which may prove an obstacle to having Biden nominate her for labor secretary. A bigger obstacle may be posed by the new front-runner for the position, longtime union activist and official Patrick Gaspard, who went from a leadership post in SEIU Local 1199 (the East Coast’s largest union of health care workers), to political director on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and then in his White House, to ambassador to South Africa, to president of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Gaspard resigned from his Open Society post last week, which has been widely taken to mean he’s been assured of the labor secretary job. (Of course, if Biden does nominate him, Republican senators will surely use his confirmation hearings to rage against Soros, who is the nonagenarian poster child for every anti-Semite’s Jew. Gaspard may well become the leading American non-Jew to be subjected to anti-Semitic attacks.)
Even if Su doesn’t make it into Biden’s Cabinet, however, she should be his automatic choice to head Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, should she want the job. There, she could expand her defense of exploited and cheated workers from California to the nation as a whole.
IN 1972, FRESH OUT OF YALE LAW, Mary Nichols sued the state of California, then governed by Ronald Reagan, to conform its air quality standards to those set by the newly created U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Seven years later, Reagan’s successor, the prematurely pro-environment Jerry Brown, appointed her to head the state’s Air Resources Board. She went on to head the Western regional office of the EPA under Bill Clinton, then led California’s Natural Resources Agency under Gov. Gray Davis, whose successor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, in one of his RINO phases, reappointed her to head the Air Resources Board, which she then continued to run under the returned Jerry Brown and the current Gavin Newsom.
In her stints at the Air Resources Board, Nichols has commissioned far-reaching studies that led her to set stricter clean air and auto emission standards for California, compelling the world’s car-manufacturing behemoths to turn out cleaner cars if they didn’t want to be shut out of America’s largest market. In time, a dozen other states also adopted California’s standards, which the Trump administration has tried to override. (Caving to Trump’s demands, some major carmakers said they’d cease making autos to California’s standards; others stuck by them, and since Biden’s election, General Motors and others have defied Trump and reversed themselves, saying they’ll stick with California’s rules.)
Nichols also has administered California’s cap-and-trade program for stationary sources of polluting emissions, the first such program in the United States. Many environmental progressives have attacked the program for providing corporations with material incentives to reduce pollution, but it was the legislature that enacted the program, not Nichols, who has, of course, faithfully administered it. By dint of all this work, Nichols is widely regarded as one of the world’s leaders in working to forestall and reverse the climate crisis.
In the realm of incidental intelligence, her father, Ben Nichols, a Cornell University engineering professor, was a lifelong democratic socialist and the longtime mayor of Ithaca, New York.
Such are Jerry Brown’s potential contributions to Joe Biden’s administration. There will probably be more.
