California Tries Trump-proofing By Another Name

SACRAMENTO, California — California politicians are still trying to protect themselves from President Donald Trump — they’re just being quieter about it.

The latest example is a trio of Democratic state bills that would enshrine pre-Trump federal water protections in state law. The key context is Trump’s promises to undo federal environmental protections, but lawmakers are avoiding making it all about him.

“We have purposely not been communicating that this bill is a Trump resistance bill,” said Sean Bothwell, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance, of a measure to insulate the state from any weakening of the federal Clean Water Act, as Trump did on Wednesday.

Lawmakers during Trump’s first term explicitly billed a previous version in 2019 as “Trump insurance.” This time, they’re going with “future-proofing.”

State Sen. Ben Allen, the author of this year’s bill, said in a release Thursday that Trump’s move makes his proposal “now more important than ever to future-proof these precious natural resources.”

“If you care about water supply, as we do, and the president says that he does, you got to care about making sure it’s a clean water supply for farmers, for personal use and everyone else,” he said at a press conference last week.

Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, meanwhile, has a bill to require the state to adopt emergency rules limiting PFAS in drinking water, going further than the federal limits set by the Biden administration. He said he was inspired both by industry’s attempts to block the Biden rules in court and the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts.

“Prior to the presidential election, there was already an effort to weaken these regulations,” said Gabriel. “This is about making sure that we, regardless of what happens in Washington, regardless of what happens in federal courts, that Californians can feel safe.”

The trio of bills is rounded out by Assemblymember Nick Schultz’s proposal to broaden a law that his predecessor, now-Rep. Laura Friedman, passed during Trump’s first term to bolster state protections for rivers if they lose their federal “wild and scenic” designation. He called it “proactive” on introducing it on the first day of the legislative session.

To be sure, lawmakers’ softened rhetoric will do little to lower hurdles from water agencies and business and agriculture groups, who all sought to moderate previous versions of the measures.

The California Chamber of Commerce is already opposing Allen’s bill, and its policy advocate Kristopher Anderson said in an email the bill “goes beyond insulating California from federal efforts to roll back water quality protections. It will disproportionately burden many industries throughout the state and drive up costs for Californians.”

But the tactic could help get the bills past Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has been broadly tacking to the right and vetoed the 2019 bill to enshrine Obama-era water and wildlife protections in state law because urban and agricultural water users argued it would limit their water deliveries. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the new bills.

“‘Trump-proofing’ are not my words — they’re someone else’s words,” Newsom told reporters in December in reference to his proposal to allocate more money to the state’s legal defenses. “‘Resistance’ is your word, not my word. I’m just making sure we’re prepared.”

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