Gavin Newsom’s Montana vacation isn’t the problem. California’s pointless travel ban is

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest conflict with the policies of the state he runs reveals more about the policies than it does about him.

The governor’s predilection for secrecy and hypocrisy was well established before he absconded to an undisclosed location that turned out to be Montana, one of more than a score of states to which California prohibits state-funded travel. What we should be questioning anew is why the state decided to revoke public employees’ passports with respect to nearly half their own country.

The policy in question is a classic example of an extensive legislative genre: a law passed for the sole purpose of allowing lawmakers to take a locally popular stand on an issue even though it’s beyond their purview or capacity to affect it.

Opinion

Authored by Democratic Bay Area Assemblyman Evan Low, passed along party lines and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2016, the travel ban was a response to Republican-run states allowing discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Under a provision empowering the attorney general to extend the ban to reflect new instances of state-sponsored discrimination, such as the more recent laws targeting transgender scholastic athletes, California now prohibits publicly funded travel to a total of 22 states.

These are bigoted, pernicious, indefensible laws. But California’s success in influencing the states enacting them can be measured by the expansion of the ban to cover even more such laws. If we’re going to restrict Californians’ movements to virtuous states, the main consequence will be that our movements become very restricted.

It’s not as if the Legislature weren’t warned about the impracticalities. An analysis prepared for the legislation’s first committee noted, for example, that it might prohibit a CalTrans employee from traveling to an out-of-state plant manufacturing government vehicles even as the state’s much more lucrative purchase of the vehicles proceeds. “If the premise of this bill is that state funds should not be spent in states that deny civil rights,” the analysis asked, “why would the state ban state-funded travel but still spend a presumably much greater amount ... procuring goods from that same state?”

Or it could prevent a University of California professor from traveling to a discriminatory state to present a paper advocating transgender rights. “Is preventing travel to other states, and the accompanying interactions with the residents of those states, the best way to encourage those states to change their laws?” the analyst asked. “Is it possible that creating more opportunities for interaction and the exchange of ideas will be a more effective means of bringing about change than prohibiting those interactions and exchanges?”

Such interstate interactions certainly couldn’t be less effective than the travel ban given that it has had no discernible effect. And given that some in the targeted states have now threatened to prohibit their residents from traveling to states like California for an abortion, our legislators might have another reason to eschew the whole business of trying to enforce their laws in other states. It’s not as if our state doesn’t have enough problems to keep them busy.

The trouble with policies designed to pander to a constituency is that no politician interested in keeping that constituency can easily question them. That’s true even if the politician is a governor in need of a vacation.