Why I am fighting the ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’ — and how the feds can help
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Naming a bill after the guy you're trying to shut up is a bold choice. Not a smart one, but bold. AB 2624 exists because Nick Shirley kept showing up with a camera and asking questions Sacramento didn't want asked, and rather than answer them, the state decided to write legislation targeting a specific journalist.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
The “Stop Nick Shirley Act” is a blatantly unconstitutional law that violates the freedom of the press. That’s why I am asking the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice to intervene to block its implementation.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the controversial bill, AB 2624, into law despite knowing that there were serious objections to
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Naming a bill after the guy you're trying to shut up is a bold choice. Not a smart one, but bold. AB 2624 exists because Nick Shirley kept showing up with a camera and asking questions Sacramento didn't want asked, and rather than answer them, the state decided to write legislation targeting a specific journalist. Newsom signed it anyway, knowing full well the objections on the table. That's not a footnote. That's the whole story.
You don't have to like Shirley's style to see the problem here. The First Amendment doesn't come with a carve-out for reporters who are annoying, confrontational, or effective at making officials look bad on camera. If California can pass a law aimed at one specific journalist's methods, there's no principled reason it stops with him. Today it's a guy with a YouTube channel embarrassing city council members. Tomorrow it's whoever the state decides is next.
Asking the DOJ's Civil Rights Division to step in isn't some dramatic overreach. It's the appropriate response when a state government writes a law that reads less like policy and more like a personal grudge with a bill number attached. Federal intervention exists precisely for moments when a state tramples a constitutional right and calls it governance.
What's telling is how little pushback this got in Sacramento before it landed on Newsom's desk. A law this obviously aimed at silencing a critic should have set off alarms the moment it was introduced, not after someone had to go running to Washington to fix it.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.