Lee Heidhues 11.9.2021
It was two long years ago today that Chesa Boudin was declared winner in the fiercely conducted election for San Francisco District Attorney.
Fast forward to today.
The Trump MAGA crowd fueled by 1.4MM, much of it right wing PAC dark money, a legion of mercenaries paid on average $17.08 per signature and shamefully aided by San Francisco pols who have resented his election, progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin will face a recall election on June 7, 2022.
This is all about the incestuous insider politics of San Francisco. Shamelessly so called moderate Democrats are allowing themselves to be used by the most reactionary elements in America.
The Recall must be smashed to send a message to the world from San Francisco.
San Francisco must let these legions of local and imported collaborators know their treachery will not go unpunished.
DA Boudin ran on a “progressive” platform of changing the way the Courts and cops look at Justice in America. The obscenely reactionary San Francisco Police Officers Association spent over $700,000 in 2019 to defeat candidate Boudin. The POA has worked non stop to destroy Chesa Boudin since he assumed office.
Despite the unceasing mainstream media attacks, opposition from the POA and other political groups, Chesa has stayed true to his campaign commitments during his nearly two years in office.
Beginning on Day One on January 8, 2020 when DA Boudin was inaugurated at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall, the political knives have been unsheathed. Finally, the reactionary forces have found their mark.
Two of the leading proponents of the Recall are close allies of Mayor London Breed.
Andrea Shorter was a major figure in Breed’s 2018 election. Mary Jung, a Moderate Democrat, was formerly Chair of the Democratic County Central Committee until she was ousted by more Progressive elements in 2016.
London Breed has yet to take a position on the DA Recall. It’s fair to say she is still smarting over Chesa’s defeat of her hand picked successor interim DA Suzy Loftus. A former legal counsel in the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department Loftus was handed the “interim” title by Breed three weeks before the November 5, 2019 election after DA George Gascon resigned to take the job of DA in Los Angeles.
It will be all hands on deck to fight for the “progressive” soul of San Francisco. The whole world’s watching.
New York Intelligencier 11.9.2021
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, one of the nation’s most prominent progressive prosecutors, is officially going to have to defend his seat in a recall election next June.
Boudin — the son of a Weather Underground member whose sentence was commuted by former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in August — is the latest target in the recall fever sweeping California. As New York’s Ed Kilgore explains, the process to initiate a Golden State recall is pretty easy to execute, requiring as little as 10 percent of the number of voters in the last election for the office in question; recall efforts serve as an outlet for the intense backlash to pandemic restrictions; and Republicans see the exercise as one of their better chances to unseat a Democrat in an overwhelmingly blue state. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom beat a recall effort by a 30-point margin; the entire operation was estimated to cost $450 million.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco Department of Elections certified a petition to add a special recall election to the midterm primary held on June 7, after organizers hoping to remove Boudin delivered 83,000 signatures in favor of the recall — well over the required 51,325-person threshold.
If voters do want to get rid of Boudin, San Francisco Mayor London Breed would appoint an interim DA until the regular election in 2023.
In 2019, Boudin won by less than 3,000 votes in the second round of a ranked-choice election. After campaigning on police accountability and the decriminalization of poverty, he has faced adversaries on his right flank, as fears of rising crime have resulted in calls for a traditional crackdown.
“We don’t need two public defenders,” public safety advocate Andrea Shorter told New York in August. “And right now, we have two public defenders: one that’s the public defender, and one that is a public defender in the district attorney’s office.”
Lee's Perspective 