California: Trump ratchets up the feud
President Trump “wants to put the most influential state in the union in its place,” said Katy Murphy in Politico.com. In recent weeks, Trump has threatened a crackdown on the state’s homelessness problem, suggesting the federal government would somehow evict thousands of people living on Los Angeles’ Skid Row and declare the “disgusting” homeless people there and in San Francisco an environmental threat. “We can’t have our cities going to hell,” Trump said. He also unilaterally ordered that the state be stripped of its long-standing authority to set its own automobile emissions standards. Why has Trump “declared war on California”? asked Paul Krugman in The New York Times. He wants to portray it as a “socialist hellhole” beset “by violent crime and rampant disease.” The reverse is actually true. While high housing costs have created a serious homeless problem, California has a booming economy, the nation’s second-highest life expectancy, and crime at historic lows. California’s progressive policies are working.
On the issue of auto emissions, Trump has the law on his side, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The 1970 Clean Air Act gave California a waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions to reduce smog. It said nothing about CO2 emissions, which “don’t cause smog.” The Obama administration gave California authority over greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, and the state has imposed electric car quotas on automakers, who will probably make up losses they suffer there by raising prices on gas-powered vehicles sold in other states. That’s a violation of the constitutional prohibition on states burdening interstate commerce. Trump is also right about California’s homeless problem, said Armstrong Williams in TheHill.com. On a recent visit to San Francisco, I saw filthy, barefoot people openly shoot heroin and pass crack pipes; “sidewalks have become open-air latrines.”
This is not a one-way war, said Andy Serwer in Yahoo.com. California’s attorney general has sued the Trump administration more than 50 times over such issues as health care and immigration, and the state has enlisted 22 other states to join its lawsuit over auto emissions rules. These battles are part of a larger “power struggle between the states and the federal government” to control policy on gun control, marijuana legalization, and other divisive issues. Prolonged court battles loom. For every business and individual caught in the middle, the result is uncertainty and chaos.