Gavin Newsom does it again with death row reprieve

Gavin Newsom is fond of making grandiloquent, headline-grabbing gestures couched in moralistic terms.
His tendency first surfaced in 2004 when, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, he directed officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of a state law passed by California voters just a few years earlier.
“I had no right to do this,” Newsom to an interviewer last year, when he was running for governor. “We didn’t have the formal authority.