Gonzalez: “In outlawing freelance journalism in California, it may look like I’m setting fire to the Constitution. But really, I just want to burn down one little alt-weekly. I can’t help it if these fires sometimes get out of control. That’s just the state we live in.”

San Diego-based California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has taken some heat lately for her role in passing AB 5, a law going into effect on January 1 that requires many California companies to treat workers as employees and not independent contractors. The ostensible motive behind the bill was to prevent worker exploitation. But at a press conference yesterday, Gonzalez revealed that a supposed side effect of the legislation — the decimation of news outlets that rely on freelance journalists to exist — was actually the point all along.

“San Diego has a weekly newspaper called the Reader,” she explained, “And it seems like every time my [husband, former Assemblyman and current County Supervisor] Nathan [Fletcher] clears his throat, this mean little rag is writing him up, citing his slippery slide from Republican to Independent to Democrat, or his two failed attempts to become Mayor of San Diego, or his divorce from a powerful Republican woman, then-RNC communications director Mindy Tucker, and subsequent marriage to a powerful Democrat woman, me, or his slick accounts of his sticky childhood, or his employment by the corrupt Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham, or his hesitancy to discuss his collegiate years, or the rumors that his job at Qualcomm was a ‘no-show’ gig, and on and on. Well, I’m all in favor of a free press, but I’m not about to let some creaky weekly drag my little Nate-Nate through the mud, not when I’ve got the power to legally hamstring their operation. Report this, you jackals!”