Tag: opinion columnists

If anyone needed proof of how swiftly political change can arrive, this fall is probably Example A.

Just observe the last month. First, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was riding high after passage of Proposition 50 and its changes in California congressional district lines made him the most successful national Democrat in countering a key initiative by President Trump.

Barely a week later, Newsom’s former chief of staff was indicted on charges of political corruption and tax fraud and many began to write him off as a presidential candidate because of it.

Not even a week after that, Newsom was back in the catbird seat after a federal appeals court in Texas threw out that state’s gerrymandered congressional district plan – which earlier provided the motive for the Newsom-sponsored Prop. 50. The U.S. Supreme Court days later temporarily reinstated the gerrymandered Texas lines.

It now appears the Texas decision nixing the changes there may be reversed by the high court, even though it was written by a Trump-appointed judge. Meanwhile the California proposition figures to survive its own court challenges, filed by the state Republican Party and the U.S. Justice Department.

That’s because Texas officials from Gov. Greg Abbott down were  open about their effort to concentrate Houston-area blacks into one district while giving five others to white Republicans. By contrast, there was little or no mention of race by either side in the Prop. 50 campaign, which was very explicitly motivated by pure politics.

Newsom created Prop. 50 specifically to counter the Texas gerrymander, which unlike California’s changes in district lines, was not adopted by a vote of the people. No race issue ever arose here until Republicans claimed after Prop. 50’s resounding win that was what motivated it.

Nothing says the U.S. Supreme Court has to give a final OK to either the Texas court decision or Prop. 50, but if it eventually tosses both gerrymanders, Newsom would still achieve his political goal of offsetting the Texas changes put in motion by a phone call from Trump to Abbott. If both efforts are eventually nixed, Newsom’s goal of regaining the prior balance after the Texas action would still have been reached.

Said one election law professor the day of the Texas decision, “There are not many grounds for a legal challenge against Prop. 50 to succeed.”

There remains a possibility that both Prop. 50 and the Texas court decision tossing that state’s gerrymander will stand up in the Supreme Court. If that happens, Newsom would have achieved far more than his goal of balancing the Texas gerrymander with an exchange of five new California Democratic seats for five new Texas GOP ones. In that case, Newsom would have given Democrats a net gain of five seats in the House of Representatives.

If something like that couldn’t put Newsom in an early lead in the 2028 Democratic presidential sweepstakes, it’s hard to see what could. A net gain of five seats would likely give Democrats control of the House, where almost all new Trump initiatives might then die.

No wonder Newsom gloating after the Texas court decision came down. In a post on X, he said, “Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned, and democracy won.” For a moment.

If U.S. tariffs on imports raise prices on American consumers, should we care if the government calls them taxes or fees?

Throughout his time as Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent has regularly fought against claims that the tariffs adored by his boss, President Donald Trump, are really just taxes on consumers.

“Tariffs are a surcharge, not a tax,” Bessent told a reporter this week. “They could be paid by the exporter, they could be paid by the country.”

Bessent likely thinks that’s a great point, but he shouldn’t drop the mic just yet. Regardless of the word games, Americans are suffering from the end result.

We are paying higher prices as a result of Trump’s tariffs. According to analysis from the Tax Foundation, Trump’s tariffs have raised consumer prices by 4.9 percentage points.

We’re paying more so the word games matter little, but Bessent does have an interest in calling tariffs fees. Fees are much more politically palatable (though I have no idea why) and the matter is before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But make no mistake: tariffs are taxes.

When it is a broad-based sales tax, the tax is levied when the goods are purchased by the consumer. When it is a tax on imports (e.g. a tariff) the tax is levied when the importer takes possession of the goods.

Just like sales taxes, the ultimate burden of tariffs can theoretically be paid by the consumers or the foreign manufacturer. Previous experience has demonstrated, however, that they’re mostly paid by American consumers, which is why prices on imports keep going up.

Bessent should know all this and is simply towing the party line.

“When you go and get your driver license, you pay a fee,” Bessent added. “Is that a tax?”

Debating the meaning of taxes and fees might be an ok rhetorical strategy, but invoking the DMV is not. Not only does this give listeners PTSD remembering the last painful visit to one of the least popular American government institutions, it also reminds us that the government has its hand in our wallets at every turn.

Apparently, it’s not enough that our tax dollars fund DMV operations; we need to pay additional charges as well. What is that ID charge for, exactly? To fund something I already funded?

It makes no sense, and neither do tariffs.

We’re told regularly that tariffs are essential to stop other countries from ripping off Americans. So the solution is for America to rip off Americans instead?

Not only are tariffs at least partially passed through to consumers, but, as the Tax Foundation points out, tariffs hurt in indirect ways as well.

When the cost of imports rise, American firms and consumers might switch to cheaper, domestically-available substitutes. But the makers of these alternatives have an incentive to increase prices to stay competitive with the tariffed imports. That’s assuming that there is a cheaper substitute.

One recent study of the effect of tariffs on the cost of wine imports published by a team of economists in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the cost of bottles of wine exceeded the cost of the tariff even when the tariff itself wasn’t entirely passed on to consumers.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown once referred to overhauling the California Environmental Quality Act as “the Lord’s work” because, he said, it made building much-needed things — housing, transportation improvements, water storage, etc. — too difficult and too expensive.

In 2018, as he neared the end of his second stint as governor, Brown vetoed a bill that would have prevented developers from circumventing CEQA’s laborious provisions by persuading local voters to directly approve projects.

It was one of hundreds of legislative measures CEQA’s defenders — environmental groups primarily — and its critics have proposed in the nearly half-century since then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed CEQA in 1970.

“Instead of the piecemeal approach taken in this bill, I prefer a more comprehensive CEQA review, which takes into account both the urgent need for more housing and thoughtful environmental analysis,” Brown said in vetoing the bill.

However during his 16 years in the governorship, Brown did virtually nothing to make the fundamental changes he said were needed. CEQA reform was in a political stalemate and, without that “comprehensive review,” governors and legislators have been dealing with the law’s impacts on a case-by-case basis.

Projects that had heavyweight backing — professional sports venues in particular — and the Legislature’s own Capitol construction project could get relief from CEQA’s requirements.

In more recent years, during Gavin Newsom’s governorship, the state’s housing shortage became a frontline political issue. CEQA became a contentious aspect of it as Newsom and legislators enacted numerous bills to remove or reduce procedural barriers to construction.

Pro-housing groups saw CEQA as a tool development opponents were using to delay or kill projects and that construction unions were misusing to compel developers to employ their members.

Newsom, whose 2018 campaign promises to jump-start housing construction had not borne much fruit, took up the cause of reforming CEQA. A few months ago, in a bill attached to the state budget, he and legislators enacted a major overhaul of the law’s application to housing, particularly high-density, multi-family projects.

“Saying ‘no’ to housing in my community will no longer be state sanctioned,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who is one of state’s the most pro-housing legislators. “This isn’t going to solve all of our housing problems in the state, but it is going to remove the single biggest impediment to building environmentally friendly housing.”

The law’s passage raises another question: Would it be a one-off, or the beginning of a more sweeping change in CEQA that would make other, non-housing projects easier to build?

The California Chamber of Commerce hopes it will be the latter and recently unveiled a ballot measure for the 2026 election that would make it happen. In the main the measure would, if approved by voters, tighten up and streamline the processes for environmental reviews for “essential projects.”

Former President William Jefferson Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union Address announced that “the era of big government is over.” Federal expenditures for fiscal year 1996 were $1.5 trillion.

A President Donald Trump-backed continuing resolution to keep the government open after Oct. 1 projects annual federal spending for fiscal year 2025 at a staggering $7 trillion, a nearly 400% spike since Clinton’s “small government” policy 30 years earlier.

Rumors of the death of Leviathan government by Trump seem vastly exaggerated. True enough, Democrats crave even more lavish federal government spending. But that does not make Trump parsimonious. The latest budget bill on Trump’s watch jumped the national debt ceiling by another $5 trillion, which would have been superfluous if real government downsizing were intended.

Trump is expanding, not diminishing, the government footprint: soaring already bloated defense spending past $1 trillion annually, investing government funds in private enterprise indistinguishable from socialism, multiplying immigrant detention centers and the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and assembling dossiers on every American using artificial intelligence.

To be sure, the agendas of Trump and Democrats in Congress are not interchangeable. Their spending priorities differ. But neither wishes to place the federal government on a diet to end annual $1 trillion-or-more deficits as far as the eye can see. Trump champions a sovereign wealth fund that would institutionalize European-like socialism. Only ingenues believe the fund might avoid capture by the incumbent president to advance a partisan political agenda.

Forty years ago this month, I began a 9,000-mile tour of California, gathering data, conversations and observations about megatrends propelling the state into the next century. The result was a 14-part series in the Sacramento Bee, later published as a book titled “The New California: Facing the 21st Century.”

Its overall theme was that massive changes in the state’s economy — shifting from manufacturing to services and technology, coupled with equally massive cultural and ethnic changes, along with rapid population growth — were reshaping the state’s future.

I quoted two researchers, Leon Bouvier and Philip Martin, who projected California’s future as “the possible emerging of a two-tier economy with Asians and non-Hispanic whites competing for high-status positions while Hispanics and blacks struggle to get the low-paying service jobs.”

Any objective description of 2025 California would conclude that Bouvier and Martin, a UC-Davis faculty member at the time, hit the nail squarely.

A new article in Forbes magazine by Michael Bernick, a lawyer who was director of the state Employment Development Department a quarter-century ago, compares two-tier California to “Upstairs, Downstairs,” a 1970s British television series.

The 68-episode series explored relationships between a wealthy family and its servants as a microcosm of the socioeconomic trends affecting Great Britain during the early 20th Century.

Bernick notes that current California economic numbers are lackluster, but behind that data is the more fundamental reality of “California’s evolving Upstairs, Downstairs economy: its prospering Upstairs college-educated professional and knowledge economy workers, and the army of Downstairs service economy workers who serve them.

“This two-tier economy is not new,” Bernick continues. “It has been building in the state over the past two decades — and in some ways since the late 1970s. What is new is how this economy is so widely taken for granted in 2025. It is accepted as the natural order by the very people on the Upstairs who regard themselves as champions and protectors of the working class and poor.”

Those in California’s mostly white and Asian overclass, Bernick writes, “have been increasingly vocal this year in denouncing the national administration. They denounce inequality and poverty, and speak often of social justice. But they are silent as to the low wage workers who attend to their daily needs, and the inequality that they benefit from. In fact, policies they and the state’s political leadership have advocated for the past decades have expanded the Downstairs workforce.”

Bernick contrasts current California with its more egalitarian and economically mobile mid-century version but adds, “There is no way of going back to this earlier economic structure of a greater self-sufficient middle class, but also no reason to do so.”

Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative figure, was assassinated on Wednesday while speaking at a college campus in Utah.

At the time of this writing, we have no clear information on the motives of the assassin. Given the rise in ideological and political violence in America, it’s not unreasonable to think Kirk was murdered for his views. Whatever the motive, it should prompt us to have a rational conversation about politically motivated uses of force in our country. 

Politically motivated uses of force are a categorical assault on individual rights and on the American method of persuasion over force. Americans should always condemn it—no matter who perpetrates it. 

The assassination attempts on President Trump are two of the prominent recent instances of political violence in this country. There’s also the shooting of lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota in June of this year, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and the murders of two Israeli embassy staffers in D.C. earlier this year, among others. 

But the evil of the use of force for ideological or political reasons is not limited to murders or attempted murders. The massive destruction of property during the BLM protests in 2020, the Charlottesville rally in 2017, the Jan. 6 riots and the several destructive pro-Hamas protests are instances of political violence, too. 

This violence is not the exclusive province of either Democrats or Republicans. It’s the province of tribalists and the uncivilized. 

The use of force is the abdication of reason. When a person engages in the use of force, they are breaking from civilization and the core values this country was founded on.

America, and civilized society more broadly, is a massive ideological achievement which happened precisely because we’ve let ideas flow, and good ideas take hold. In an America true to its core principles, we don’t shoot our political or ideological opponents like cowards. We don’t destroy property in order to make a point. We use our speech to disagree with our opponents. We challenge them in the marketplace of ideas. We try to persuade, not coerce. We use words, not bullets. That’s the American way. Anything different from that, now and in the past, is an appalling deviation from our core values. Such deviations have occurred repeatedly throughout American history, and we should learn from those mistakes knowing that they lead to destruction. 

Exercising and protecting our rights never requires attacking the rights of others. No cause can ever justify the use of force. It doesn’t matter what cause the perpetrators support. It doesn’t matter if one agrees or disagrees with their cause in principle. When force starts, support for the aggressor must end, and condemnation must begin. 

We all have the responsibility of condemning and ostracizing those who engage in violence, no matter their views. Part of the massive damage that tribalism (the blind, unthinking allegiance to a group) has done to America and the West is that too many people try to rationalize or play down the use of force when it’s someone from their “tribe” perpetrating it—or when it’s perpetrated against the opposite “tribe.” These include those who disgustingly celebrated the murder of Brian Thompson and all but beatified his alleged assassin, and those who made light of and mocked the attack on Pelosi’s family and the Minnesota lawmakers.

When former Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she would not enter California’s gubernatorial race, the assumption was that she did so in order to take another shot at the White House in 2028.

However, it increasingly appears that Democrats – at least those in California – have begun passing on the former VP in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Moreover, as Newsom continues leading the fight against Trump and GOP-led redistricting, there are signs that Democrats across the country may soon rally around the California Governor.

According to a new Politico-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab survey, which sampled California Democrats, Newsom leads Harris by 6-points (25% to 19%) in preferences for Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee.

In that same vein, Emerson polling from early August found very similar results. In that poll – also conducted among California voters – Newsom (23%) led the Democratic field, with Buttigieg (17%) and Harris (11%) behind him.

Further, political betting site Polymarket shows Newsom (28%) with the best odds to be Democrats’ 2028 nominee, 14-points ahead of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 23-points ahead of Harris.

To be sure, while 2028 is a considerable time away, these polls are not outliers.

Rather, they reinforce a point I made in these pages nearly two months ago: the political prospects for Newsom and Harris are sharply diverging.

Indeed, immediately after the 2024 election, Harris dominated 2028 polling.

At the time, polls, including this one from Puck News/Echelon Insights in November 2024 showed Harris holding a 33-point lead over the 2nd place Newsom (41% to 8%).

Similarly, an Emerson survey – also taken last November – reported that Harris led Newsom by a virtually identical 30-points (37% to 7%).

Behind Newsom’s improving political fortunes appears to be the increasingly front and center role he’s taken in fighting back against Trump and Republicans.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing saga over redistricting, an issue Newsom is using to raise his profile among Democratic voters, and which he is increasingly staking his 2028 hopes on.

To that end, as the redistricting issue garners more attention and with California lawmakers set to pass the measure to put it on the ballot, the risks for Newsom raise in tandem.

Should California voters pass the ballot referendum this fall, polls suggest that it will be a boom for Newsom’s chances in the Democratic primary.

One recent survey from UC Berkeley-Citrin Center shows that nearly two-thirds (63%) of national Democrats support California redistricting as a response to Texas’ efforts.

Further, former President Barack Obama has joined Newsom’s supporters, saying that California’s response to Texas is a “reasonable approach.”

Interestingly – and likely why Newsom is pushing so hard for redistricting – national Democrats are considerably more supportive of drawing new districts than those in California.

As I cited last week, more than 6-in-10 (61%) of California Democrats prefer the current system of an independent redistricting commission, versus just 39% who want politicians to redraw the maps.

In other words, with national Democrats overwhelmingly supportive of partisan redistricting, Newsom is hoping that he will garner their support if he successfully pushes the ballot measure through – and he very well may.

With all of this being said, there is a significant downside should California voters reject the Governor’s push, a very real possibility.

The aforementioned California poll revealed that 64% of all California voters opposed partisan redistricting, while 36% supported giving lawmakers the power to redraw maps.

Joining the nearly two-thirds of Californians in opposition to Newsom’s efforts is former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. And while Schwarzenegger’s campaign is non-partisan – he even endorsed Harris in 2024 – California Republicans have joined in.

According to Politico reporting, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he’s planning to raise more than $100 million to fund an opposition campaign, along with $30 million already promised by Charles Munger Jr. – the son of Warren Buffett’s late partner.

Whether or not the opposition is enough to overcome many Californian’s desire to push back against Trump and the GOP remains to be seen.

But it is clear that Newsom’s success is not a foregone conclusion.

With that in mind, should California voters reject the ballot measure, the defeat would be a tremendous blow for Newsom’s 2028 hopes.

Not only would the governor have failed to land an actual hit on Trump – something no Democrats or Republicans have truly been able to do thus far – but national Democrats may feel Newsom is ineffective.