California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom was condemned by a California Republican Congressman for his seemingly duplicitous efforts to forestall the passage of a drug policy proposition supported by mayors across the state, including San Francisco and San Jose in the north to San Diego and Santa Monica in the south.

Proposition 36, titled the “Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act,” is backed by district attorneys across California and intends to amend Proposition 47, passed in 2014,  by increasing penalties for some drug and theft crimes. “Among other provisions, Proposition 36 would allow prosecutors to charge certain cases of drug possession as ‘treatment-mandated felonies,’ rather than misdemeanors, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report,” the Sacramento Bee reported, adding, “The 2014 voter-approved initiative made some lower-level offenses misdemeanors and set a $950 felony threshold for shoplifting.”

“I’m very concerned about this drug policy reform that takes possession and makes it a felony,” Newsom said Thursday. “And increases the size of our prison population by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, over the next decade at a profound cost to the taxpayers. And I don’t think an improvement of public safety.”

“We’re working with the Legislature on an independent parallel track — doesn’t require going on the ballot — to support an effort there that’s targeted and specific,” he continued. “Not the scattered shots that folks on the now-Prop. 36 are trying to advance, which would send us back to the 1980s, as it relates to drug policy in this state.”

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) blistered Newson on the floor of the House of Representatives, declaring:

This is the initiative to end the era of Proposition 47 in California, which has been responsible for a huge increase in theft, in other crimes, in homelessness, in drug use, in drug overdoses, and a whole host of other problems. The initiative has qualified for the ballot and will be voted on by Californians this November and I believe will pass overwhelmingly this November in spite of one of the most corrupt schemes in the history of our state that was cooked up by the governor of California. Actually a number of repeated schemes; all very novel and unprecedented in character; all directed to undermine the Democratic process in California; all meant to continue to make our communities unsafe, and all of which, despite the governor having an overwhelming supermajority legislature, failed.

“I think that it’s simply important to note, for all Americans to see, when you have something like this that happens within our system; where you have an elected official, in this case, the governor, who directly seeks to undermine the democratic process,” Kiley charged.

Kiley recalled the efforts to stop the proposition from getting the requisite signatures to qualify for the ballot, then the effort to remove the proposition from the ballot by pressuring the organizers of the initiative to withdraw it, then the effort to “[insert] poison pills into a smattering of existing public safety bills in the legislature,” which stated “something truly incredible, which is to say they would be automatically reversed if voters passed the End Prop 47 initiative in November. The point of this was to give the Attorney General the pretext for lying to voters about what the initiative would do. They’d say, ‘Because now there was this poison pill that would reverse all of the public safety bills if voters passed the initiative, that the initiative is now actually an anti-public safety bill.’”

Kiley noted that the legislature rebuffed that action, but then, “In the 11^th hour, when it was past the deadline even to put an initiative on the ballot, the governor offered up a Hail Mary where he said, ‘Okay, I can’t get the End Prop 47 initiative off the ballot so what I’m going to do is put on my own competing initiative which is watered down, which is a very weak initiative, but that will be enough to confuse voters.’ And what’s more, he put in there that if his initiative passed with higher numbers than the other initiative, then the other initiative would be wiped out in its entirety, even though there are a lot of things in it that didn’t conflict. It was literally a mechanism that the governor proposed, drafted, introduced in the legislature to overturn the results of a democratic election in California where the End 47 initiative could have passed with 60% of the vote and nevertheless it would have been null and void according to the trick the governor tried to implement. He even moved back the deadline for propositions to qualify; he even moved back the deadline for the Secretary of State to number the proposition so that his own fake proposition — the ‘imposter initiative’, we called it — would get a higher number and then have a better chance of getting more votes.”

“I condemn in the strongest possible terms the concerted efforts by the governor of California to thwart and undermine our democratic process in an attempt to keep our communities unsafe,” he concluded.