If ever there’s been a political move that amounted to pure grandstanding, it was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s late 2024 executive order telling a state commission to give millions of California electric customers some rate relief.

Normally, when the governor orders a state commission to do something, he can be pretty sure his wishes will be carried out. That’s because the governor appoints virtually all state commission members and they serve at his pleasure. He can bounce them any time.

That’s true for the state Energy Commission, the Air Resources Board, the Parole Board and many others. But not the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which sets natural gas and electric rates for all the private, investor-owned utilities in the state.

Yes, the governor does appoint the five utility commissioners. But no governor can fire them. They serve staggered six-year terms, with either one or two appointments expiring every two years. The only appeals from their decisions are to state appellate courts, not ordinary county courts, as with all other agencies.

Once a governor anoints a PUC member, they are set for years to come, almost as secure in the job as federal judges, who get lifetime appointments.

So when Newsom issued his executive order, it wasn’t really an order. It was a wish. It was for show. He can tell PUC members what to do, but unless they have ambitions for other future appointments, his wishes mean no more than those of any other citizen.

When it was designed in the early 1900s, all this was supposed to make the PUC independent. Instead, regardless of whether they’ve been appointed by Democrats or Republicans, PUC members for more than 50 years have tended to kowtow to the utilities they are supposed to keep in check.

Newsom’s order told the commissioners to review more closely how companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric spend customer money to stop transmission lines from sparking wildfires. Those expenses have been the supposed basis for several rate increases over the last two years.

One result is that California now has the second highest electric rates in the nation, behind only Hawaii, where all fuel burned to create power has to be shipped thousands of miles before it is used.

California electric bills have risen by as much as 110 percent — meaning they’ve more than doubled — over the last 10 years. In just the last three years, charges to customers of the three big privately owned utilities are up by more than 20 percent.

Those increases, paid by every consumer either directly or as part of their rents, were all approved by Newsom appointees who received only cursory vetting from the state Legislature before they were rubber-stamped.

Newsom may not have power to enforce his current executive order, but if commissioners want reappointments to their cushy jobs — where almost all the tedious scut work is done by clerks or administrative law judges — they might at least try to please him.

Newsom’s executive order comes atop his calling a special legislative session last fall with the aim — achieved — of getting lawmakers to force gasoline refiners to keep substantial stocks on hand at all times to avoid price gouging during times of routine maintenance or plant outages.

Such gouging has been frequent over the last 40 years, with collusion between the oil companies that run the state’s big refineries becoming obvious. Any outage at any one refinery invariably brings huge price increases at every gas station. In February 2023 alone, this amounted to a $2 per gallon increase in pump prices within a two-day span.

Newsom tried to seem like a consumer champion by putting the clamps on some energy price hikes, while at the same time allowing his appointees at the Air Resources Board to make changes in gasoline formulae that appear certain to cause price increases.

It’s a complex scene and one that suggests political motivation by Newsom. Why else would he issue his latest executive order, knowing all the while that no one involved has to pay it any heed?

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.