Proper leader of California resistance
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s aggressive legal counterattack to Trump administration policies has been compared to the efforts by Texas to undercut President Barack Obama’s orders on everything from the environment to immigration to transgender rights.
In the midst of that flurry of lawsuits, the Texas attorney general at the time, now Gov. Greg Abbott, famously described his typical workday to a Tea Party gathering in 2013: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home.”
Altogether, Texas sued the Obama administration almost 50 times.
I had a chance to ask Becerra about the comparison as part of a wide-ranging interview before an audience at the City Club of San Francisco.
“My job is very different,” he said. “When I take any action that relates to the federal government, it’s principally been to expand people’s rights and to protect their constitutional rights — versus to diminish people’s rights and exclude individuals. So I look at what we’re doing in California as very different in substance to what Texas did previously, even though we’re using the same mechanism.”
If the current trend continues, Becerra’s Department of Justice could very well approach the breadth of Texas’ attempted blockades on all things Obama. Becerra’s office has challenged President Trump on the travel ban from selected Muslim-majority nations, on potential sanctions against sanctuary cities, on curtailment of subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and multiple White House attempts to undercut California’s cleanair rules.
None of this was a surprise. It was widely accepted that the reason Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Becerra to succeed Kamala Harris after her election to the U.S. Senate was that the 12-term congressman would have the gravitas and the savvy to defend California values in a hostile environment.
The full-frontal resistance is not without risk.
Even before his December confirmation, Becerra was being warned by some legal scholars to tread carefully in suing the federal government. After all, any significant state-vs.-feds conflict was likely to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which Trump came into office with a chance to cement its conservative majority — which he did with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch. As the saying goes, “courts can’t rule on what’s not before them.” Texas had a decidedly mixed record in the Obama years, clearly winning only a handful of its nearly 50 cases.
Becerra acknowledged there is “a lot of merit” to such admonitions. A courtroom should be “the place of last resort,” he said.
The goal is “to defend what California is doing,” he said. “I’m not suing the federal government because I don’t like what they’re doing. I’m only going to sue them to stop us from doing what we’re doing.” So far, it’s working. Becerra was considered a surprise choice for attorney general, and in many ways seemed an unlikely leader of the California resistance. Yet now he has shown himself to be an ideal fit for each role. He has that rare combination in politics: a self-effacing, disarming style with a fierce commitment to principles. Sincerity and seriousness.
He plans to run in 2018 for a full term as attorney general, but his escalating profile would almost certainly put him in the mix if a certain other Washington-based statewide office were to become available.
I had to ask him about the issue that dominates Washington: the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In May, he had suggested that the specter of impeachment was on the horizon. Had anything since then changed his mind? He paused for a moment. “I think we’re headed in that direction; I don’t see how we’re not,” he said. “I think this is self generating on the part of the president. If our institutions work properly, we’ll get to the bottom of it. It may take a while. Watergate took a while.
“This is not Watergate. This is way different. Watergate was a two-bit burglary. This is a foreign government, adversarial to many of our interests, trying to influence our election.”
The words were delivered with a calm deliberation that gave them authority, and helped illustrate why Xavier Becerra is the right leader for the California resistance.