California Democrats: Pause The Resistance!

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure …

As Donald Trump prepared to take office, Democrats in the California state legislature returned in a special session to launch La Résistance 2.0. Never mind that wildfires ripped through northwestern Los Angeles and the infrastructure to fight them had failed. The state’s Dem-dominated legislature appropriated $50 million to “Trump-proof” the state … whatever that meant.

Suddenly, though, it has become excruciatingly apparent to even the dimmest Dem that California’s political establishment will need Trump’s help to survive this disaster. And now the state legislature has told Californians to start the revolution without them, or something:

After major backlash from Californians and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the Assembly walked back a vote on Newsom’s $50 million slush fund to sue Trump.

Los Angeles is battling a catastrophic wildfire, and California faces a massive budget deficit for future years. The…

— Brian W. Jones (@SenBrianJones) January 30, 2025

The Sacramento Bee has more on the retreat:

California legislators were tight-lipped about their decision Thursday to delay votes on a pair of bills that would provide up to $50 million combined for the state Department of Justice and organizations that provide legal services to respond to actions taken by the administration of President Donald Trump. 

The Assembly was set to take up the bills after they were approved last week in the Senate. But Democrats were called into a closed door meeting shortly after their work for the day began. 

When they emerged roughly an hour later, the measures were not voted on before the body adjourned for the week.

Quelle surprise! The biggest shock is that it took these geniuses twenty full days to realize that Trump would be the one person who would dictate the terms of federal aid they will desperately need to keep voters mollified enough to prevent them from punishing the party that ran California into the ground. Not to mention, it may have finally occurred to them how self-obsessed Sacramento Democrats looked while going out of their way to spend $50 million on their Orange Man Bad obsession while tens of thousands of Californians watched their homes go up in flames. 

Even Politico scoffed at the “punt,” as they called it last night. And it turns out that the legislation itself had its own problems, emphasis mine:

It is Day 11, and California remains un-Trump-proofed.

Democrats in the California Assembly were expected to send a $50 million package to the governor today to pay for legal defenses against President Donald Trump’s administration. Instead, they punted. 

Officially, the speaker’s office blamed the Trump administration’s funding freeze for the delay, saying lawmakers wanted to be sure the bills were “airtight and protect all Californians” before they could vote.

But the decision also comes amid concerns about who would be able to access $25 million in legal aid to avoid deportation. Democrats — newly sensitive to perceptions of being soft on crime — this week faced criticism from Republicans who noted that the legislation doesn’t explicitly prohibit nonprofits from using the money to help undocumented immigrants with criminal histories.

Well, that seems like a teensy little problem, especially given how popular the arrests of criminal illegal aliens have become. Democrats might have thought on January 10 that they could rely on the media to paint Tom Homan’s efforts as the Heartless Racism of L’Homme Orange, but it turns out that American voters are actually rather glad to see vicious criminals taken off their streets, and Trump is now even more popular than ever. Suddenly, the toxic narcissism behind La Résistance Part Deux looks to get set in even greater relief — even in California, as the legislature wants to keep criminal aliens on the streets of Angelenos using the tax dollars harvested in part from the victims of the wildfires.

Small wonder they punted. They could come back around to it later, perhaps, but maybe some sense of political reality has begun to dawn on California Democrats. For once.