State Senator Scott Wiener, a progressive representing San Francisco who is likely too radical for most moderate Democrats, has decided to run for a seat in the US House of Representatives. This could be a gift to President Donald Trump. He was already handed a halfway-to-Christmas present when self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, helping the chief executive frame the opposition as dangerous fringe radicals. Now, Wiener’s announcement will probably help the president solidify his argument and seal the deal.
On June 27, Wiener filed paperwork to run for Congress in 2028, when term limits will force him out of his seat in the California legislature. And, in a potentially delicious scenario for Republicans, the seat he is unabashedly eyeing belongs to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Natural Successor to Pelosi Fiefdom?
“I’ve been clear that I intend to run for this seat whenever the race opens up, whether in 2026 or 2028. This filing is a critical step to prepare for the serious work of running to succeed one of the icons of American politics,” Wiener declared after the filing.
For better or worse, Pelosi has indeed been an icon of Democratic politics in the 21st century, though one baleful glance at the current state of the party following the disastrous 2024 presidential elections speaks volumes. Republicans who see her as one of several key architects of the Democrats’ steep decline from mainstream debate to identity politics hysteria are only too happy to acknowledge her for such status. They would likely enjoy painting Scott Wiener as the inevitable face of a post-Pelosi Democratic Party.
For nearly a decade, Wiener has proven an abject embarrassment to blue partisans seeking to present Democrats as the real party of working-class Americans. A Liberty Nation News article in 2018 titled “San Francisco ‘Values’ Herald the Death of the Democratic Party” prominently featured some of his worst excesses as a state legislator.
Wiener is an in-your-face homosexual rights advocate who in 2024 marched in a San Francisco parade shirtless and clad in leather. “Senator Scott Wiener served a sexy leather daddy look at Folsom Street Fair again,” a headline at LGBTQ national news site The Advocate exclaimed.
Gavin Newsom Gets Wiener Whammied
In 2017, Wiener crafted legislation that lowered penalties for adults having sex with a minor if the age gap is ten or fewer years. The measure applies to children as young as 14. In 2020, he garnered national attention by championing a bill to reduce the criminal punishment for knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV without disclosure from a felony to a misdemeanor.
To his unavoidable future political discomfort, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose White House ambitions are undisguised, signed that latter act into law.
In 2023, Wiener did it to him again. He got a bill passed allowing hookers to loiter on the street for purposes of prostitution. Amazingly, Newsom signed it into law. Republicans were quick to pounce all over him for it.
“As predicted, the new policy empowered pimps and hindered efforts to address human trafficking operations,” GOP state Senators Brian W. Jones and Janet Nguyen wrote in a May 2023 op-ed for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Jones and Nguyen revealed the real-world outcome of Newsom’s signature affixed to radical legislation by Wiener.
“A local television station released a video showing sex workers soliciting outside a Catholic school in East Oakland. Concerned parents said this was a regular occurrence outside of the school: ‘It’s every day, during all periods of the day,’” the senators wrote.
Wiener has also long been a steadfast vocal advocate for transgender children. In 2022, he sought to make California a “sanctuary state” for trans kids.
It should go without saying that this is all political catnip for Republicans as the woke excesses of the 2010s and early 2020s are discarded by Americans far more worried these days about being able to afford their groceries.
As Trump and his red allies constantly stress about Democrats, Wiener fundamentally does not grasp that his brand of progressive excess is starkly out of date in America today. His reaction to the anti-US Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles in June only reinforces this.
“ICE’s escalating paramilitary raids are deeply inhumane and un-American. ICE is targeting workers who make our clothes, build our homes, and grow our food,” he declared in an official statement from his California Senate office.
Wiener’s total failure to understand that the American people see illegal aliens as an unfair economic burden on the middle and working classes is made worse by his leaning on classic Trump Derangement Syndrome histrionics that smack of the laziest go-to quote of some faceless staffer in a now widely reviled Biden administration circa 2021.
“What we’re seeing in Los Angeles – and now other parts of California – is straight up police state fascism,” Wiener asserted. “Trump is a President, bound by the rule of law, but he is acting like a king. He is not a king, and we must fight against his lawless actions. San Francisco stands united with our brothers and sisters in Los Angeles, arm in arm, against Trump’s brutal, fascist tactics.”
The sad truth for Democrats, of course, is that Scott Wiener is not out of their mainstream. He has especially close ties with 2024 party presidential nominee Kamala Harris who, despite her crushing loss in November, remains a clear favorite if she chooses to run for California governor in 2026.
Harris played a crucial role in first electing Wiener to the state Senate in 2016 when her “big endorsement,” as the San Jose Mercury News described it in October of that year, just weeks before Election Day helped tilt a close race his way.
Harris also endorsed his re-election to the state Senate in 2020. “I’ve known and worked with the next Vice President of the United States [Harris] for nearly 20 years,” Wiener wrote in an August 2022 Twitter post. “Kamala Harris also knows me and my work. I’m honored to have Kamala’s endorsement of my reelection to the Senate. So much work lies ahead.”
Learning nothing from the November 2024 national fiasco, there are far too many progressive Democrats in California still eager to see a party attuned to the political vision of a Kamala Harris-Scott Wiener dynamic. Donald Trump and Republicans eager to solidify their current dominant position over the rest of the continental US well into the future wish them godspeed.
