In 2020, with COVID-19 spreading and polling places closing, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that every registered voter in California be mailed a ballot. The point was simple: nobody should have to choose between their health and their vote.
James Gallagher, then a state assemblyman, went to court to stop it.
He and fellow assemblyman Kevin Kiley sued the governor, calling the order an "illegal power grab." The case is named Gallagher v. Newsom.
What happened in court
Gallagher won the first round. In November 2020, a Sutter County judge ruled that Newsom had exceeded his emergency authority, finding that the California Emergency Services Act does not let a governor amend statutes or write new ones. The ruling did not change the results of the 2020 election.
He did not get to keep the win. On May 5, 2021, California's Third District Court of Appeal struck down that injunction and upheld the governor's broad authority to issue emergency orders during the COVID-19 emergency.
It's worth being precise about what the case was and wasn't. It was a separation-of-powers argument — who gets to make California law, the governor by decree or the Legislature — and it is a real constitutional question that a trial judge agreed with him on. It was not, on its face, an argument that Californians shouldn't be allowed to vote.
But the thing he was asking a court to stop was ballots going to voters. In a pandemic. That was the practical relief sought, whatever the legal theory.
The part that grew
The lawsuit didn't stay narrow. It started as a challenge to the vote-by-mail order and expanded into an attack on the governor's power to issue emergency orders at all — the same authority behind the state's entire pandemic response.
That fits the rest of his record from those years. When California considered removing the personal belief exemption for the COVID vaccine in schools, Gallagher called it "wrong and an unconscionable overreach into the family over a virus that poses very minimal threat to young children."
He runs on it
Gallagher has spent years telling voters he is the man who fought vote-by-mail, and he's right about that. It is one of the things his name is known for in California Republican politics. The case literally bears it.
That's worth sitting with, because most politicians would rather be known for what they built. Gallagher's signature legal achievement is a lawsuit to stop ballots from being mailed during a public health emergency — one that was ultimately reversed on appeal.
Where it points now
The instinct in that case was to find a forum that would override a decision he'd lost politically. In 2020 that forum was a California court, arguing the California Legislature held the power.
Now he's in Congress, and the forum has changed. Last month he put an amendment on the House floor asking the federal government to study how it could "preempt or otherwise mitigate" state fuel policies — Washington overriding Sacramento. It failed by four votes.
Different venue, same move: when California's own institutions produce an outcome he doesn't like, go somewhere else and ask them to undo it.
Why it matters
Gallagher is now a member of Congress at a moment when access to the ballot is under sustained pressure nationally — new documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements, purges, and fights over mail voting in state after state.
His record on the question is not a guess. He sued to stop a state from mailing ballots to its own registered voters during the deadliest public health emergency in a century, and he tells voters about it on purpose.
Californians deserve a representative who makes voting easier, not one whose best-known case made it harder. We deserve better.
Source
"Republicans sue California Governor Gavin Newsom, claim his vote-by-mail order is an 'illegal power grab'" — CBS News, 2020. Trial ruling via KRCR; appellate reversal in Gallagher v. Newsom, Third District Court of Appeal, May 5, 2021. Official portrait, 119th Congress.
