California’s special session of legislature to fight Trump is a gift to Republicans | Opinion

Well that was fast. Donald Trump had named exactly one person to staff his new administration when California Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special session of the state legislature to meet starting just after Thanksgiving to pass legislation funding planned fights with the freshly-reelected former president.

Newsom and the Golden State standing athwart the Trump train tracks yelling “Stop!” is about the best news Republicans could get. California is everything that the nation just voted against in a convenient package.

To put things in perspective, Democrats completely dominate the state from the governor’s mansion and the attorney general’s office to supermajorities in the state legislature that run roughshod over the paltry number of Republicans who fight back and local governments where Trump loyalists are nearly nonexistent. The state is progressivism in its purest form.

Take the top three issues in the election to start — inflation, immigration and crime.

Inflation: California has the nation’s most expensive housing because state and local laws make it increasingly impossible to meet growing demand. The Dallas area of Texas builds more housing annually than the entire state of California. Building is so difficult that this year the state legislature had to exempt itself from its own environmental laws to build new offices. Basic housing for the homeless costs several times as much as an average home in the rest of the country.

California is a top 10 oil producer among US states, but has the nation’s most expensive gasoline. A state regulator is about to impose new climate change rules that will boost them another $0.50 a gallon — by its own low estimate will cost consumers $160 billion. A previous round of environmental rules passed by the legislature led one of the state’s few oil refineries to announce it is shutting down. Perhaps that’s because it would cost the company a fortune to comply. Less gas means higher prices. Two other refineries are considering their options.

Immigration: While the Biden-Harris administration was desperately trying to end a wave of millions of undocumented immigrants at the southern border, California’s legislature was adding new incentives for them to come. Since it is so hard for poor undocumented immigrants to buy houses at the inflated prices of the Golden State, this year the legislature made them eligible for six figures worth of taxpayer-financed downpayment assistance that might never have to be paid back. A new law allowed state universities to use public funds to hire undocumented immigrant students for jobs at the schools in violation of federal law.

Crime: The state’s crime problem is so bad after passing laws that turned some felonies into rarely-prosecuted misdemeanors and opening the doors to state prisons that Newsom had to call out the National Guard to fight drug crime and assist with local prosecutions in multiple cities. In one of the nation’s most liberal states, an initiative to toughen laws back up specifically for drug crimes and theft passed with over 70% of the vote — even though Newsom fought the measure and the legislature tried to derail it with a poison pill. In the worst hit cities, voters defeated the elected prosecutors who oversaw the surge in property and drug crime.

The litany of destructive policies in California is endless. On homelessness, the state spent tens of billions of dollars to fight the problem, but it only got worse — perhaps because, as a government-funded watchdog found, the state didn’t track whether its spending was doing any good. The state has spent tens of billions of local and federal tax dollars and a decade on a bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So far, you can ride exactly zero miles as the expected cost has risen over $100 billion. The state passed a law making it illegal for local schools to tell parents that their children are transgender. Oh, if your trans kid runs away to California, the state can revoke your parental rights.

In California, there are no messy compromises with Republicans. Democrats get exactly what they want. And the results are plain to see. California has the nation’s highest unemployment rate. IRS data says that the people who move out of the state heading to Texas and Florida have high incomes and the people who move there have low incomes. And the public schools are a disaster.

If Newsom and his heedless Democratic allies put the state in the spotlight of battles with Trump, they can expect to drive horrified moderate Americans right into Trump’s waiting arms.