The Leventhal Report – Newsmax TV – Broadcast May 27, 2025
Rough Transcript:
Marc Morano on California Waiver: “When I was working at the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, under the Bush administration and later the Obama administration, this would always come up. We’ve been trying to defeat this California waiver for a long time. We never had the votes, we actually have the votes now, and we actually have a President who wants it get rid of it now.
The key, why this is so important, it sounds so democratic to say, ‘Oh, well, every state should have its own power, why we’re infringing on Governor Newsom.” We are not. Governor Newsom never even allowed a single voter in California to have a say in this EV mandate. This was done by executive order, then followed up by the California Air Resources Board — unelected bureaucrats. Then it was picked app by the Biden EPA. Then, 11 other state Governors went along with it again, without a single vote, and this was the way it was around the world with gas-powered car bans. So what they’re doing is they’re telling California, you can no longer set standards that the automakers are going to have to follow — which was to 40% of the country, when the 11 states in California were going along with this EV mandate.
I hope it withstands these court cases, because ultimately this is about consumer choice; we shouldn’t have unelected bureaucrats telling us gas-powered cars are bad. You can never drive him again, as Gavin Newsom basically said. If we allow gas-powered vehicles, California is going to have smog; he wants to ban the sale of gas-powered cars within less than a decade or so, and he was on course to force that on Californians against their will.
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Morano: Automakers are not innocent here. Now, you have all these automakers who were against the EV mandate. Well, they were for it before they were against it. Why were they, for all of these mandates, because they made money? Stellantis took millions of dollars to build alleged plants and then closed them. After 6 months of taking taxpayer money, all the automakers supported it when it looked like the government was forcing it on them. Now, of course, they shifted sales, but I think what we’re seeing here is that this is very cruel. You said poor people in apartments, people who don’t drive — all of these green mandates that Governor Newsom, California, has traditionally done, and beginning with Arnold Schwarzenegger, remember. He was the first climate hero governor by the way, all of his climate hero activity of Arnold Schwarzenegger was back in 2006 — the California climate bill didn’t even go into effect to long after he was out of office and it literally resulted in California having the highest energy prices, highest electricity prices.
Gavin Newsom bragged during COVID that the state is home to more billionaires than any other state. That’s the kind of state that California is, and it pounds poor people. Pound people on fixed income — seniors — they’re the ones who have to pay a high percentage of their income in energy costs. So this is a huge restoration decades in the making to return sanity to us, energy policy, and no longer allow California to dictate for the rest of us what automakers are going to do, and what the environmental standards are going to be.
Rick Leventhal: Some Democrats voted with Republicans, I mean, when does that ever happen, and why would it happen in this case?
Morano: It is happening because of the unpopularity of the gas-powered car ban, remember, as you mentioned, this happened during COVID. This was during the lockdowns that no one voted for. This was during the mask mandates. No one voted for the vaccine mandates, no one voted for all of it, it was imposed, just like the gas-powered car ban was imposed. And by the way, had Donald Trump not been elected, they were going after meat-eating. They were going after it through methane restrictions in the Biden EPA. John Kerry had already said we’re setting our sights on American agriculture, Bill Gates is funding all of course, the lab-grown meat, and buying up U.S. farmland. They were going to do the same thing, but they weren’t going to do it as obviously with meat. They weren’t going to say we’re going to ban meat, they we’re going to make it rare and more expensive in the words of the World Economic Forum. So the reason some Democrats are being forced to vote against this first of all, it is absolutely bonkers.
You have Democrat governors now reversing these mandates in their own states, because the regulations were bonkers to begin with, Rick. They had no chance of ever meeting these targets other than causing one simple thing, a la Cuba, which would be driving restrictions and vehicle restrictions. That’s all they were trying to do was reduce the number of vehicles and make it so you could force people into public transit, and that’s not very popular.
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As they mentioned lawsuits, court cases are ahead, so don’t expect anything too fast to change. A lot of the automakers and all of industry likes regulatory certainty, and we’re still far from that until these court cases are flushed out.
Rick Leventhal: Well, Marc Morano I appreciate your insight on this. It was a pleasure. I wish I had more time. Thanks for joining me.
Morano: Thank you very much.
