When you can’t resist

Resistance remains all the rage in California, where the gas tax increase is quite a bit more popular than President Trump. But sometimes, in the famous words of a fictional alien collective cybernetic organism, resistance is futile.

Take state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León’s response to the tax rewrite passed by Republicans in Congress and signed by Trump last month. He wants to help Californians circumvent the new $10,000 limit on deductions for state and local taxes, which disproportionately hurts California and other high-tax states, by disguising their payments to the government as charitable donations to a “California Excellence Fund” and therefore still deductible. In other words, it would make dodging federal taxes the state’s official policy.

De León, D-Los Angeles, deserves credit for creativity in countering an irresponsible, partisan tax overhaul and for the vigor of his efforts to approach the name recognition of Dianne Feinstein, whom he is attempting to oust from her U.S. Senate seat. And Congress certainly encouraged such gamesmanship with provisions that conspicuously target Democratic states.

But the proposal looks most likely to provoke a losing battle with the IRS, which has already countered state and local efforts to allow taxpayers to squeeze more out of the deduction before it expires. True, federal tax officials’ position would be complicated by the fact that they allowed a similar maneuver enabling states to subsidize private schools through tax credits for charitable donations. But one government tax gimmick doesn’t justify the next.

Another controversial recent change in national policy, the Federal Communications Commission’s reversal of rules guaranteeing equitable Internet access, has state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, taking on another uphill fight. In a potentially quixotic bid to regulate the Internet from Sacramento, Wiener has crafted legislation that would use state rules and purchasing power to force telecommunications companies to abide by the so-called net neutrality requirements repealed by the FCC.

California legislators have been so eager to resist Trump, whose historic unpopularity makes him the softest target in Democratic politics, that they have sometimes moved to counter policy before he makes it. Now that they have more concrete causes for resistance, they still have to choose their battles wisely and focus on problems that are clearly within their purview — many of which will have nothing to do with the president. Sometimes the only realistic means of undoing federal policy is a federal election.