Becerra, who would need to be confirmed by the Legislature, would fill the impending vacancy left by Kamala Harris, who was elected to the U.S. Senate last month. The nomination will not be official until Harris resigns. 

“Xavier has been an outstanding public servant – in the state Legislature, the U.S. Congress and as a deputy attorney general,” Gov. Brown said in a statement. “I’m confident he will be a champion for all Californians and help our state aggressively combat climate change.”

Prior to being elected to Congress in 1992, Becerra served one term in the state Assembly. He also served several years as deputy attorney general.

“Governor Jerry Brown has presented me with an opportunity I cannot refuse,” Becerra tweeted. 

What it means for the state

The pick breaks up the Bay Area’s stranglehold on statewide offices – only two of the eight statewide elective office holders are from outside the Bay Area. Becerra, from Los Angeles, will be the third.

The pick also ends months of speculation, which at times suggested Brown would pick his wife, Anne Brown Gust (Brown dismissed those rumors). Becerra’s name had not been previously mentioned, but the timing coincides with House Democrats’ leadership elections earlier this week.

Glass ceiling in Congress

Becerra, the fourth highest ranking Democrat in the House, for years has been limited by leadership’s glass ceiling and Nancy Pelosi’s re-election as minority leader this week only reaffirmed that Becerra had limited options.

Becerra was set to be forced out of leadership, having served his two terms. He had been seeking the top Democratic spot on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Musical chairs

If confirmed, Becerra leaves his own vacancy and shakes up the 2018 statewide elections.

Becerra has not announced any intentions beyond accepting the appointment, but as a statewide officeholder, he would have a bigger platform to run for the attorney general (of which he’d be a frontrunner as the incumbent) and possibly governor or Senate, should incumbent Dianne Feinstein decide to step down. 

CQ Roll Call reported that soon after Brown’s announcement, former Assembly Speaker John A. Perez announced his intention to run for Beccara’s spot in Congress. The seat is safely Democratic — Becerra had just been re-elected with 77.2 percent of the vote against a fellow Democrat. 

“In the aftermath of November’s election nationwide, two facts are clearer than ever,” Perez said in a statement, according to CQ Roll Call. “The first is that we need to fight harder than ever to protect the progress we’ve made. The second is that California is the one place in the country where Democrats know how to win, and the one place in the country where government is working.”

Earlier this week, Perez had told Politico he was mulling a run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Confirmation

Becerra should face an easy confirmation in the Legislature, which is overwhelmingly run by Democrats. Following Brown’s announcement, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon sent his support.

“With his long record of public service in the Attorney General’s office, the Assembly, and Congress, Xavier Becerra clearly has the experience to step into this vital role,” the Paramount Democrat said in a statement. “Just as important, he has great tenacity and he respects the rights of all Californians — much-needed qualities for an Attorney General given the troubling times ahead. I applaud Governor Brown for making this bold and inspired choice.”

“You up??” he asked his press secretary, Evan Westrup.

Nearly 45 minutes later, Westrup sent Brown and first lady Anne Gust Brown a copy of a Washington Post story on California’s high-speed rail project.

They needn’t have worried. This long Jan. 5 story by Post national reporter Reid Wilson appears to be the one Westrup sent the Browns, and it largely accepts the governor’s characterization of the project’s relative progress and downplays legal challenges.

The groundbreaking “really marks the transition from all the planning and appropriations and legal challenges and the design work to continuous construction,” said Dan Richard, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the project’s governing body. “It’s a significant milestone.”

Financing problems were acknowledged, at least.

Even with the legal and political victories, the funding structure is incomplete. Voters approved a $9.95 billion bond aimed at funding the initial construction of the rail project in 2008, by a slim five-point margin. The Obama administration added another $3.2 billion in federal grants, and the legislature agreed in 2014 to provide funding through cap-and-trade taxes on greenhouse gases, which will add another $250 million to $1 billion per year.

Still, that means the rail authority will have about $26 billion at best, less than half the estimated total costs.

Touting the Japanese financing model

But the reporter’s lack of background on the issue led him to accept uncritically Richard’s theory about how the project could be partially funded.

Richard, chairman of the rail authority, said his agency doesn’t expect federal funding in the next four to five years. He pointed to Japan, where nearly a third of funding for high-speed rail projects comes from real estate development near rail stations.

But the state government needs the money up front, not after the system is up and running — specifically $31 billion for the initial 300-mile operating segment, per a Superior Court ruling that Attorney General Kamala Harris chose not to appeal.

It’s interesting how East Coast reporters seem more likely than East Coast opinion writers to accept upbeat takes on the Golden State’s most costly infrastructure project. Both the Washington Post’s editorial page and Post editorial writer/columnist Charles Lane have expressed incredulity at the state’s handling of the project.

Failing the ‘best evidence’ standard

Here’s the opening of a tart Lane column from Jan. 9, 2012:

In announcing the appointment of a new economic adviser last summer, President Obama emphasized his commitment to fact-based policymaking. It’s “more important than ever,” he said, to get “recommendations not based on politics, not based on narrow interests, but based on the best evidence, based on what’s going to do the most good for the most people in this country.”

If only the president and his political ally, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), would follow that advice regarding their pet project for the Golden State: high-speed rail. No matter how many times they tout the mega-project as the job-creating wave of the future, they can’t change the mountain of evidence that high-speed rail is, in fact, a boondoggle.

You can read the whole Lane op-ed here.

A May 18, 2011, Post editorial — link here — was even harsher.

California may be about to spend a fortune to plan and build a stretch of high-speed track that would end up as a railroad to nowhere in the all-too-likely event that funding for the rest of the system never materializes. But the LAO, the state-level equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office, argues that the legislature should halt most further spending on the project and not start construction until the state can negotiate more flexible terms from the federal government and — crucially — relocate the first section to a route where a fast train would be economically viable even if the entire system never gets built.

There is a certain poignancy to the LAO’s plea for everyone to stop and think. The benefits of high-speed rail in California might indeed outweigh the costs, the LAO notes, but “at this time there is little reliable information to inform this decision.” Think about that for a minute: Fifteen years have passed, and millions of dollars have been spent on studies since the state first passed a law creating a high-speed rail program. Yet after all that, no one really knows whether it’s worth doing. If no one has come up with a convincing rationale by now, maybe there isn’t one.

Maybe this Post coverage is what made the governor anxious about the newspaper’s coverage of his project’s groundbreaking ceremonies.