Dianne Feinstein’s Replacement Is Here. Who Is She?: California governor Gavin Newsom selected EMILY’s List president, Laphonza Butler

California Democrats were already jockeying to run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat next year and Governor Gavin Newsom sidestepped the contenders by announcing he would appoint Laphonza Butler to the seat.

While Newsom made good on his vow to appoint a Black woman to the Senate, does Butler’s job offer come with a poison pill?

Guest: Alex Sammon, Slate politics writer.

Pairing leadership with justice: Is that so hard, Washington?

It was an example of leadership and justice. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, fresh off surviving a recall vote, was not laying low but standing in front of cameras, signing a bill that would return prime property in Manhattan Beach — known as Bruce’s Beach — to descendants of the Black couple who had been run off the land they owned close to a century ago.

It turns out the very white Manhattan Beach was not always that way; the transformation was not by coincidence, but by design.

“As governor of California, let me do what apparently Manhattan Beach is unwilling to do: I want to apologize to the Bruce family,” said Newsom, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. He then handed the signing pen to Anthony Bruce, whose great-great-grandparents, Willa and Charles Bruce, had once turned the lovely stretch along the water into a needed getaway for African Americans, complete with lodge, cafe and dance hall.

Newsom wasn’t standing alone, literally or otherwise. Behind stood activists with organizations such as Where Is My Land, co-founded by Kavon Ward and Ashanti Martin, who have worked hard and know that the meaning of the word “reparations,” so feared in some circles, is merely “the making of amends for a wrong one has done.”