The Leopards Eating People's Faces Party regrets to confirm that Governor Gavin Newsom of California is presently engaged in a last-ditch effort to prevent a proposed billionaire wealth tax from reaching the state's voters, having offered private reassurances to a major Democratic donor that the measure would be negotiated away before the June 25 legislative deadline.
The Party wishes to note, with its customary composure, that Governor Newsom has for many years maintained an exceptionally well-fed stable of leopards, nourished through sustained cultivation of high-net-worth donors whose financial support has underwritten his rise from San Francisco mayor to the threshold of national ambition. The feeding has been consistent, generous, and well-documented.
It is therefore with only the mildest administrative surprise that the Party observes the governor now deploying the full weight of his office not to pass transformative economic policy, but to ensure that the very constituency that fed his leopards is not, itself, lightly nibbled. The platform was always the eating of faces. The Party made no exceptions for seven-figure check-writers.
In this instance, however, the Party acknowledges a directional complexity. The faces not being protected — the working Californians on whose behalf the tax was proposed — did not, in the main, fund the leopards. The governor's own face, accordingly, is the one the Party is watching with professional interest.
Should the tax die by the June 25 deadline, the Party will file a routine confirmation. Should the governor one day discover that donor-class loyalty is itself a set of very sharp teeth, the Party will file that confirmation with equal courtesy.
The Party remains committed to the eating of faces and has no plans to revise this commitment.