AB 2164 would have turned California into a legal fortress — shielding doctors who perform abortions and transgender procedures on out-of-state patients from extradition to their home states. It was sponsored by California Attorney General Rob Bonta himself. And Governor Gavin Newsom, the man who has never seen a progressive bill he didn't want to take to prom, vetoed it.
His reason wasn't that the bill went too far. His reason was that it stepped on his turf.
Newsom told legislators that "extradition is an exclusively executive function" — meaning he, the governor, gets to decide who California hands over to other states. Not the legislature. Not the attorney general. Him. The bill, in Newsom's framing, wasn't bad policy. It was a power grab aimed at his own office.
That's the part the progressive coalition backing AB 2164 didn't see coming. Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, called the veto "a high-brow, academic justification for refusing to codify legal protections." Pavitra Abraham, director of Reproductive Freedom for All, warned that without the bill, California's protections are "just one election away from extradition."
Both reactions tell the same story: Newsom's allies expected a rubber stamp and got a constitutional lecture instead.
The bill would have codified a 2022 executive order Newsom signed doing roughly the same thing — blocking extradition for what the legislation termed "legally protected health care activity." Two related bills, AB 1954 and AB 1930, remain pending as the September 30 veto deadline approaches. But the flagship legislation, the one Bonta put his name on, is dead.
This isn't the first time Newsom has pump-faked his own base. In 2025 he vetoed a bill that would have required insurers to cover a full year of hormone therapy. That veto drew quieter criticism, but the pattern is the same: sign the executive orders that generate the headlines, veto the legislation that would make them permanent.
Pediatric gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed, who has testified that "every single systematic review of the evidence" shows insufficient support for youth gender interventions, pointed to the veto as evidence that even California's political class knows the ground is shifting. Reed has warned that current protocols are "harming future homosexuals" and gender-nonconforming children — language that would have been career-ending three years ago and now gets cited in gubernatorial veto messages.
The progressive read on this is that Newsom is protecting his 2028 presidential ambitions by keeping controversial policy under executive control rather than locked into statute. That way, he can claim the protections exist when talking to donors in San Francisco and claim he defended executive authority when talking to moderates in Michigan.
Newsom called his own COVID beach closures "insane" and his French Laundry dinner "boneheaded" — but only after the political cost had already been paid. The veto of AB 2164 follows the same playbook: take the progressive action quietly by executive order, then veto the legislative version and pocket the moderation points.
The executive order from 2022 still stands. The protections Newsom claims to support are still technically in place. The only thing that changed is that they can be undone with one signature from his successor.