Contracting is the opposite of governmental regulation. It allows people to make mutually beneficial agreements without the coercive powers of the state dictating the terms. People make contracts every day without government interference.

When it comes to contracts for the use of one’s digital likeness, Sacramento now wants to limit this freedom, driven by a technopanic over generative artificial intelligence.

Assembly Bill 459 targets so-called “digital replicas,” which are virtual representations of real people. Creators have been employing replicas for decades, using teams of skilled animators and computer-generated imagery (CGI). AI streamlines and reduces barriers to this technology, making it easier for smaller producers without large movie studio budgets to incorporate digital replicas into their art.

Of course, when technology becomes available to the masses, it’s more difficult to control.

The bill would insert government into the creative process, unnecessarily dictating special provisions about the use of digital replicas if the business seeks to create a digital replica of an agreeable employee. What’s worse is the legislation would be retroactive and invalidate existing contracts if the employee was not represented by a lawyer or union representative during the negotiation period.

Californians can adopt a child, get married, sell a house, create a last will and testament, and organize a corporation in the Golden State without paying a lawyer or union dues. But sign an agreement about digital replicas? That’s a bridge too far, say the sponsors of AB 459.

While one can appreciate the wisdom of individuals retaining counsel in many contexts, it’s not the government’s job to require that for digital replicas or any other reason. Such a requirement is likely unconstitutional and, as a policy matter, is a dangerous overreach that compromises the individual liberty of performers and ordinary Californians.

What’s more, AB 459 does nothing to address actual harms, and potential harms, associated with digital replicas created using AI. This technology has been used for exploitation. The phony pornographic AI-generated images of Taylor Swift released on social media last month is a shocking example. Likewise, an AI-generated voice clone used to convince parents their child was kidnapped, or an unauthorized dental ad featuring an AI-generated Tom Hanks, were not created by good-faith businesses, but rather malicious actors seeking illicit financial gain.

AB 459 does nothing to curtail or punish such behavior but imposes a variety of new costs on individuals and businesses that seek legitimate uses of the technology.

The proposal is simply impractical. The law’s terms like “digital replica” and “generative artificial intelligence” are ill-defined and so vague that it’s unclear how such a retroactive requirement would even apply.

As is often the case, Sacramento is rushing to regulate complicated questions that may be better answered by others. Copyright law is a federal matter and it makes sense to see what Congress may do before we try to preempt a more deliberative action.

There are worthy concerns underpinning AB 459. No one wants to see actors and creators exploited by new technology. But Sacramento shouldn’t go it alone.

Lance Christensen is Vice President of Government Affairs at California Policy Center.

“The 2024 Super Bowl in Las Vegas symbolizes the ultimate convergence of the NFL’s showcase event and the beacon of American betting,” Rotowire, a website devoted to sports gambling, recently noted. “This historic pairing is set to amplify the excitement surrounding the game, potentially making it one of the most bet-on events in history.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court voided the anti-gambling Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had been passed in 1992 with the full support of sports leagues, 38 states legalized sports wagering and the leagues signed sponsorship deals with major gambling corporations.

However, California and Missouri, the home states of Sunday’s contenders for the National Football League title, are two of the holdouts, so their residents cannot legally place bets on their favorite teams.

After the federal anti-gambling act was declared unconstitutional, it was immediately apparent that promoters of sports wagers would target California, the nation’s most populous state and home to 14 major league sports teams. With billions of dollars potentially at stake, the gambling industry’s major players pressured the Legislature to act but essentially battled to a draw over which faction would have the upper hand.

As with many other legislative stalemates, the contenders shifted their conflict to the initiative process and eventually two measures were placed before voters in 2022.

Proposition 26, sponsored by a dozen Native American tribes that already owned casinos, would have allowed sports bets at their casinos and at four horse racing tracks – the inclusion of the latter aimed at neutralizing a potential opponent.

Proposition 27, backed by a coalition of gaming companies, such as FanDuel and DraftKings, would have allowed online sports wagers. Three small tribes that did not have casinos also supported it, since they could have derived some financial benefits.

Upwards of a half-billion dollars were spent on campaigns for and against the two measures but both went down in flames. It was, however, a strategic win for the tribes, whose virtual monopoly on legal gambling in California was protected.

“Everybody knows this: You don’t come and try to screw the tribes,” Victor Rocha, conference chairperson for the national Indian Gaming Association, later told CalMatters.

Given the outcome, there was little appetite for another legislative effort or another ballot battle. However, last year a couple of businessmen, gambling industry veteran Kasey Thompson and blockchain executive Reeve Collins, submitted two potential sports wagering initiatives to the state Department of Justice and began trolling for support from California tribes.

Stripped of politics and self-interest, is there really any reason for California to deny its residents opportunities to legally bet on sports? After all, the state already allows Californians to legally kill their brain cells with alcohol and marijuana, pollute their lungs with cigarette smoke and gamble with cards and slot machines, on horse races and in the state’s own lottery.

Sports wagering is no worse than these other vices. While a purist might decry betting on athletic competitions, it’s already legal in many other states and the sports leagues themselves have embraced it.

Given all of that, it’s somewhat hypocritical for California to continue its prohibition.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Today in California, that vision looks exceedingly small.

How else to react to the forthcoming statewide launch of a so-called fast food workers’ union? This new entity is not a union in the traditional sense, it has no self-sustaining funding source, and no employer is obligated to bargain with it. Moreover, it has no apparent power beyond collecting feedback from the union’s existing supporters.

If a union-in-name-only is the SEIU’s future, no wonder union president Mary Kay Henry announced her retirement this week.

This fast food flop is a debacle of the SEIU’s own making. The union spent more than a decade working on its Fight for $15 and Union campaign, a wildly-expensive undertaking to unionize fast food restaurants. The final price tag topped $100 million. The union achieved its policy goal of normalizing a $15 minimum wage, but it failed spectacularly at its goal of unionizing fast food workers.

(As of its most-recent Labor Department filings, the SEIU’s National Fast Food Workers Union reported zero members.)

Struggling at the national level, the union turned to its legislative allies in California. It worked for several years to enact the so-called “Fast Recovery Act,” a scheme to create a new council that would regulate wages and working conditions for fast-food workers. The idea: Save the union the unproductive hassle of signing up new workers, and instead make all of them subject to a union-controlled government board.

Though it took the union two legislative sessions to pass it, over fierce resistance from restaurants, it eventually got to the Governor’s desk in 2022. He signed it on Labor Day that year.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The restaurant industry successfully collected more than one million signatures to put the unpopular law to voters in a 2024 referendum. To prevent an embarrassing public defeat at the ballot box, the SEIU found itself in an unusual position of weakness–at a bargaining table with its sworn enemies in the hospitality industry.

In exchange for pulling the referendum, the SEIU’s signature Fast Food Council was transformed into a smaller-toothed tiger, an advisory board whose primary power is to increase the relevant minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living. The union’s scheme to destroy the franchise industry was scrapped. And liberal localities like Los Angeles and San Francisco were prohibited from raising fast food wages above any state mandates.

The one policy priority the union achieved in the negotiation–a $20 minimum wage for many fast-food restaurants–has already proved deeply unpopular. The Wall Street Journal reported that fast food prices in California are among the highest in the country, and set to rise even higher thanks to this SEIU-backed wage mandate. Restaurants report cutting workers’ hours and benefits, and even scrapping lunch service–all to keep their doors open in response to a $20 minimum wage.

After several years of lobbying and untold millions spent, the SEIU in California is still lacking the one “win” that matters to its leadership: New dues-paying members. Private sector union membership remains at an anemic six percent nationwide, and fast food workers are apparently no more interested than other employees in signing up. Perhaps these workers see how the SEIU is squandering its members’ dues on fake food unions–and decided they would rather keep their money.

Michael Saltsman is Executive Director at the Employment Policies Institute

Its admission to the union in 1850 was largely driven by the gold rush, which temporarily supplanted the agriculture and cattle ranching that had been economic mainstays.

When the gold rush cooled in the late 19th century, farming and ranching resumed their central roles. It’s hard to believe now, but Los Angeles County was the nation’s most agriculturally productive county in the first decades of the 20th century.

The state’s northern reaches developed a major timber industry, and oddly oil was first discovered in 1865 amid Humboldt County’s dense forests, a historic fact perpetuated in the name of a tiny hamlet, Petrolia.

However, Southern California saw a much larger oil boom in the final years of the century, and California quickly became the nation’s biggest petroleum producer. Simultaneously, the movie industry blossomed in Southern California, thanks to its scenic settings and sunny weather and the desires of early movie moguls to escape from the East Coast’s intolerant attitudes and legal disputes.

California’s economy, still largely rooted in extracting resources from the earth, underwent a major change when the nation became embroiled in World War II. It became a staging point for the Pacific war, the site of numerous military training bases and an industrial powerhouse producing airplanes and other tools of war, such as ships.

California’s central role in producing weaponry and training military personnel continued after the war because the United States soon found itself in a cold war with the Soviet Union, one aspect of which was a hot war in Korea and later another conflict in Southeast Asia.

California also saw postwar expansions in civilian industries with steel mills, petrochemical plants, auto assembly lines and multiple other factories. However, by the 1970s, California’s heavy industry was shrinking as one-by-one the plants that had employed hundreds of thousands of workers shut down, with the last remaining major manufacturing industry, aerospace, drying up as the Cold War ended in the 1990s and Pentagon contracts disappeared.

Fortunately, military research contracts and Stanford University had spawned a new industry – digital technology – centered in the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco. For many decades, it was an agricultural center. Renamed Silicon Valley, it has anchored California’s economy ever since, generating immense wealth that percolated through other economic sectors.

California’s economy may be undergoing another evolution. Silicon Valley’s high-flying past is giving way to a more uncertain future as companies shed thousands of workers and other states see tech industry growth.

California’s past, present and uncertain future deserve intense political, media and academic attention because how its economy evolves will determine how well the state as a whole manages during the 21st century.

However, the center’s first paper – aimed at framing the existing economic picture – is not reassuring. It all but ignores the structural factors that threaten the economy, dwells on superficial effects, and shows a fondness for political mitigation of those effects rather than fixing the fundamentals.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), calling the prices of bank overdraft protection “junk fees,” now proposes to interfere with these prices.

We’ve been down this road before. Last year, the CFPB proposed capping credit card late fees at $8 as part of President Joe Biden’s populist appeal to consumers who dislike this cost, which is obviously everyone. The problem, as I and many others explained at the time, is that late fees encourage timely payment, and their practical elimination leaves lenders unable to offset the risk of working with people who have lower credit.

The result will be fewer lines of credit available to those who need credit the most. But that’s a difficult outcome for most to see compared to the tangible benefit of lowering fees. Even consumers denied credit won’t know what or who to blame, so it’s no surprise that CFPB is expected to finalize the late fee rule any day now.

The next CFPB price-control scheme would cap overdraft fees at levels as low as $3 per overdraft transaction. Commenting on this rule, Biden sounded perfectly populist: “For too long, some banks have charged exorbitant overdraft fees — sometimes $30 or more — that often hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest, all while banks pad their bottom lines.” He added, “Banks call it a service — I call it exploitation.”

I get it. I remember the annoyance I felt when I was charged such fees. However, I reminded myself that it was the price to pay for not having one of my checks bounce or a debit card payment declined. It’s fair to wonder whether most of the people proposing these rules have ever had a checking account balance low enough to need the overdraft cushion.

In fact, overdraft protection is an optional, opt-in service that allows consumers to spend money they don’t have at the bank’s expense. Purchases are approved that would otherwise be declined for lack of funds. For low-income consumers, this service is sometimes vital. And indeed, consumers report by wide margins that they are glad it exists even though it naturally comes at a cost.

Thankfully for all of us, CFPB bureaucrats agree that banks should charge a fee. Unfortunately, they think they know best what these fees should be. They think they know the exact costs of honoring charges for customers with negative balances better than the banks do. And remember, because banking is competitive, any bank that charges excessive overdraft fees will lose customers to banks that don’t. That $30 fee per overdraft transaction is the price that emerged among the competitive forces that keep prices lower than they could be.

Because of bureaucratic interference, many who see overdraft protection as preferable to other short-term credit options, such as payday lending or high credit card balances, will have fewer choices as some banks decide that the service isn’t worth offering at the price deemed appropriate by government officials.

Banks might go even further. Given the slim profit margins they earn on small bank accounts, it’s possible that the loss of overdraft protection revenue results in some simply abandoning the very customers — the least well off — whom interventionists claim to be protecting.

Politicians and bureaucrats appear not to be learning much, either. When planners make ham-fisted attempts to alter complex systems or intervene in markets, results rarely match their expectations.

Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

However, despite this calamitous display of party politics, the government’s work to fix the crisis on our Southern border, as well as help our allies, cannot – and must not – be finished. 

As a matter of policy, the border security bill was a good deal for the country as a whole, Democrats and Republicans alike, California as a border state, as well as Israel and Ukraine, particularly the latter, which is experiencing dire shortages of ammunition due to stalled U.S. aid.

Indeed, the proposed bill addressed crucial national security concerns such as the flooding in of foreign nationals from countries like China and Venezuela, and would have also cracked down on drug trafficking, including the alarming surge of fentanyl related deaths in the United States, one of the biggest consequences of our porous border.

In terms of immigration policy itself, the bill would have put a cap on the number of border crossings per day and installed three ‘automatic triggers’ to shut down the border: If 5,000 migrants were caught within the course of a week, or 8,500 in a single day, as well as giving the President power to close the border if there were an average of 4,000 migrant encounters per day over a seven day period.

The legislation also would have tightened the nation’s asylum system, removing the courts from the migrant appeals process, and putting those decisions in the hands of a more conservative internal review board, a sure-fire win for Republicans. 

Of course, Republicans did not get everything they wanted. The bill took a long time to get to the House, and during that time, the border problem worsened. On top of that, the proposed bill does not automatically shut the border, nor does it go as far as the GOP may like, in terms of restricting immigration, and while they may have a point, politics is the art of the possible, and this bipartisan bill should be promoted for what it does do, not what it does not. 

In that same vein, it would surely be a mistake for Republicans to do what Trump did in 2018, holding out for a “perfect” deal that is effectively unachievable. 

The bill was even endorsed by the acting head of Customs and Border Patrol, as well as the union which represents border agents – hardly a bastion of the political left. And while neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, the deal was no less a good one for each party and a step in the right direction – one could even call it a compromise. 

Put another way, not only did the bill include red-meat for Republicans, it would have also addressed one of the greatest weaknesses of the Democratic party and the Biden administration to date – a perception that they are weak on the border. 

To that end, less than one-quarter (22%) of American voters say Biden, rather than former President Trump, is better able to secure the border, while a strong majority (57%) back the former president over the incumbent on this critical issue, per recent NBC News polling.

Far from being an outlier, the aforementioned NBC poll is one of a slew of polls which underscore how big of a vulnerability this is for Biden and Democrats: Across all recent polling, Biden’s approval on the issue of immigration and the border is a dismal 32% according to the RealClearPolitics average.

Perhaps that is why the deal was “dead-on arrival” when it hit the Republican-controlled House floor. The worst kept secret in Washington is that Donald Trump wants the border to be a hammer with which he can slam Biden, and unfortunately – but also unsurprisingly – Republicans are bowing to Trump, which is not only irresponsible, but also bad governance. 

While it is fair for Republicans to ask why it took so long for legislation to reach the House floor, this is no time for political games, especially given the inclusion of GOP priorities in the bill.

For Democrats, it appears that there is finally a realization that the border is a big vulnerability in 2024, which may explain why Senate Democrats agreed to some of the bill’s provisions. And while the House GOP is largely responsible for the bill’s failure, Americans will likely blame Democrats, as they are the party in power, reinforcing Republican messaging that Democrats cannot be trusted to handle the border crisis.

Moreover, for Democrats, the failure to pass funding for Ukraine hamstrings Biden’s ability to follow through on his promise since the start of Russia’s invasion, that the United States would not let Ukraine be defeated.

Closer to home, California would have benefitted dramatically from a deal. California is home to 10.4 million immigrants, 23% of the nation’s foreign-born population. And by a margin of more than 2-to-1 (62% to 30%), Californians do not feel the southern border is secure enough to prevent migrants from entering the country illegally, according to a UC Berkeley poll conducted last month.

Ultimately, a deal on the border was a chance to show Americans that President Biden and Congress could govern from the center, and would have given both parties an opportunity to show they can put solutions over partisan politics, if for nothing else than to solve an urgent problem facing the country.  

This failure – especially on a bill both parties recognize is sorely needed and which addressed priorities on both sides of the aisle – has left our elected officials looking incompetent once again, exposed vulnerabilities on both sides, and demands renewed efforts to push this bipartisan legislation over the finish line. 

Douglas Schoen is a Democratic political consultant.

So it may be this year with The Squad, a small knot of U.S. representatives who, since the first four of their number were elected in 2018, have been the darling of the Democratic Socialists of America and, more recently, the Hands-Off-The-Houthis set. The original four — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — have since been joined in the House of Representatives by Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Greg Casar and Summer Lee.

Squad members have established formidable social media star power and a knack for drawing attention. They have not necessarily been the humblest, the most deeply thoughtful or the most effectual members of the Democratic caucus, however, and are regarded warily by many of their Democratic colleagues. When it comes to the Mideast, for example, not one of them can confidently be said to know Hamas from a harmonica, the Gaza Strip from the Louisiana Purchase, and it shows. They have been nothing if not reliable: there hasn’t been a murderous attack on Israeli civilians that they haven’t ignored, whitewashed or defended.

There is reason to think that their ranks may be in for a thinning, and it has a lot to do with hubris.

Over the last 10 days, Bush, a two-term congresswoman from Missouri, confirmed that she’s under investigation by the Justice Department after the House Sergeant at Arms announced that he had been served with a subpoena for records of her expenditures. It seems that she has funneled tens of thousands of dollars of campaign funds to her romantic partner, now her husband. Bush claims that the payments were for “security.”

In the meantime, no doubt helped by concerns about Bush’s sometimes bizarre conduct, her primary challenger, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, matched Bush’s fundraising in the last quarter of 2023 and had twice as much cash on hand as she did at the beginning of 2024.

Bowman was censured by the House for falsely pulling a fire alarm in a Capitol Hill office building a few months ago, causing the building to be evacuated just when Democrats were trying to delay a floor vote. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and was placed on probation. This may have been a move he learned from students when he was a middle school principal in New York, but it is hardly the only eye-rolling feature of his career.

Turns out Bowman once posted a poem he wrote promoting nutcase theories about Sept. 11. A building destroyed by al-Qaida, he wrote, was actually a “controlled demolition.” About the planes used to attack America, he posted “Minimal damage done / minimal debris found / Hmm,” embracing a wacko conspiracy theory that the U.S. faked the whole thing advanced by, well, wackos, suggesting that Osama bin Laden had been falsely “blamed” for 9/11 so that we could satisfy a craving to go war. “I was debating diving into a doctoral degree,” Bowman recently explained.

Omar has had a propensity for antisemitism (“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!”) and other forms of self-inflicted controversy, but she has taken it to the bank, raising $1.6 million last quarter. She is going to need it; she is facing a rematch with a primary opponent, former Minneapolis City Councilor Don Samuels, whom she just barely defeated two years ago.

The Squad members have prided themselves on not being shrinking violets. For a few of them, however, the bloom may be off the rose. November will determine whether, come the new Congress, it’s the Squad’s size that has shrunk a bit.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Consider this headline in The Atlantic: “Why Trump Uses ‘Invasion’ to Describe Immigrants.”

The article ripped Trump’s “racist language”: “If you want to know the roots of the ‘immigration invasion’ rhetoric that President Donald Trump has championed time and again — and which was echoed in the racist manifesto linked to the man held for the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, last weekend — you can find them in the anti-Chinese diatribes that circulated on the West Coast a century and a half ago.”

CNN wrote: “Trump Shocks with Racist New Ad Days Before Midterms”: “The Trump ad also flashes to footage of the migrant caravan of Central American asylum seekers that is currently in Mexico, which Trump says is preparing an invasion of the United States, implying that everyone in the column of people fleeing repression, poverty and economic blight is bent on murder and serious crime on US soil.”

A Time Magazine headline read: “Donald Trump’s Anti-Immigration Rhetoric is Rooted in Racism. Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Was Never About Legality — It Was About Our Brown Skin.”

But in a recent interview, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, a left-wing flamethrower with impeccable Trump-hating credentials, pulled out the “I word.” Speaking to a stunned Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), one of the authors of a proposed immigration bill, Sharpton went full Trump: “You are seeing an influx of migrants all over the country that, frankly, have people outraged. … Why are you allowing this to continue? … I mean, we’re looking every day at the invasion of migrants, and they are playing a time game with politics on this?”

Neither The Atlantic, CNN nor Time slammed Sharpton for his “racist rhetoric.”

On illegal immigration, many Democrats used to sound like Trump before Trump. In a 1993 speech, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid said: “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides. And that’s a lot of services.” Reid later apologized.

In 2005, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama said: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”

In 2009, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said: “First, illegal immigration is wrong. And a primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration. … People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally.” Goodness, didn’t even say “undocumented.”

The top issue during the Iowa caucus was immigration. “60 Minutes” just ran a segment on illegal aliens using TikTok for a step-by-step guide on where and how to enter the country illegally. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed his state’s National Guard to defend its border. Several migrants beat up NYPD cops. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who once brazenly said, “our borders are not open,” barely dodged impeachment. And now, even Sharpton calls the unprecedented number of illegal entries an “invasion.”

Is Trump still a “racist”?

Larry Elder is a bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an “Elderado,” visit www.LarryElder.com. Follow Larry on Twitter @larryelder.

Today, more than 100 days later, the discourse remains dangerously lopsided.

This false victim-aggressor dichotomy frames Israel as a colonial oppressor, a gross distortion that not only undermines the truth but also emboldens terrorists like Hamas and their allies and is an affront to the historical legitimacy of Israel and the Jewish people’s right to exist.

The argument that Israel is a colonial entity completely disregards the millennia-old, deep-rooted connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral land and trivializes the Jewish struggle for a homeland.

In fact, the current state of Israel is not actually the first state of Israel –– there have been at least two previous kingdoms of Israel and an unbroken Jewish presence until the present day, facts decolonization rhetoric conveniently ignores or distorts.

The chant “from the river to the sea” has been a staple of virtually every anti-Israel protest. Some, like Rep. Rashida Tlaib, have called it an “aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

Suffice to say, that is a minority viewpoint, especially when you consider the full phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As in, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, there will be a Palestinian state. Meaning no Israel. So, it’s not exactly peaceful coexistence when you effectively advocate for the annihilation of an entire nation and its people.

What anti-Zionists refuse to admit is that Israel is a nation borne out of history and the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people and upheld by international law and global support. Critics that dismiss Israel as an “illegitimate freak state” blatantly ignore the fact this land has always been the cradle of Jewish civilization. Jews originate from the land, derive their religion and practices from it, and despite centuries of exile and displacement, have always kept an unbroken presence there.

I empathize with younger generations in Western societies who feel a responsibility to make right the evils of systemic racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. However, Israel’s story is distinct, diverging significantly from these Western constructs, and it’s a profound misstep to apply them to the complex, multifaceted nature of Jewish identity and survival.

Significantly, a considerable portion of Israel’s Jewish population descends not from so-called European colonizers but from Jewish refugees expelled from Arab and Muslim countries and Holocaust survivors. Far from the prevalent misconception of a dominantly “white” or Ashkenazi Jewish state, nearly half the Jewish population of Israel is in fact Middle Eastern.

These individuals sought a safe haven in their ancestral land, not as conquerors, but as displaced people. The establishment of Israel was the fulfillment of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, a beacon of hope and resilience against the backdrop of centuries of persecution.

And if Israel was truly a settler-colonialist state dominated by white Europeans, that would make it hard to explain how 21% of Israelis are Palestinian Arabs, who have the same rights and responsibilities as Jewish Israelis. That includes serving in the military, the Knesset, and Israel’s Supreme Court. But that is yet another inconvenient truth for those who hated Israel even before Hamas went on its spree of murder, rape and kidnapping.

Words matter when Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan calls Hamas a “liberation group” that was not a “terrorist organization.”

It must be said unequivocally, like it has been said repeatedly since the world’s only Jewish state was re-established in 1948: Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable.

October 7 was not a random act of violence; it was a calculated assault by a terrorist group that has repeatedly declared its intent to destroy Israel and Jewish people. Hamas, with its terrorist army numbering as many as 40,000 and funded by billions of dollars from countries hostile to Israel, has made its mission clear.

Only with this clarity can we find a path toward a peaceful resolution that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Russell Schwartz is president of the American Jewish Committee’s Los Angeles Regional Board.

Governors and legislators would estimate how much money they had to spend during the forthcoming fiscal year, which was fairly easy because most of the state’s revenue came from predictable sales taxes. They would set aside enough money for basic governmental functions, and divvy up the remainder in response to specific requests from legislators and interest groups, with few legal mandates.

The process became much more complicated after voters passed Proposition 13, the iconic property tax reduction measure in 1978. School systems and local governments that had depended on property taxes clamored for state aid to make up for lost revenue, and overnight the budget became a much larger and infinitely more complicated document.

That complication soon spawned another element of the annual process: “trailer bills” to implement the budget’s financial decrees by changing laws governing how the newly allocated money should be spent.

Over the ensuing 40-plus years, the number of trailer bills blossomed. Eventually, they ceased being just adjuncts to the budget and became vehicles for major changes in policy having little or nothing to do with the budget.

That has been especially true since 2010, when the state’s voters passed Proposition 25, a measure sponsored by Democratic politicians and public employee unions to change the required vote on the budget from two-thirds of both legislative houses to simple majorities.

The measure eliminated the ability of Republican legislators to influence the budget. It also gave budget trailer bills legal standing, declaring that they, too, could be enacted with simple majority votes and – like the budget – would take effect immediately upon being signed by the governor.

Thereafter, Democratic governors and legislators would often draft last-minute bills containing sweeping policy changes, insert token $1,000 appropriations to tie them to the budget and pass them with little or no opportunity for the public or affected interests to know what was happening. Since trailer bills take immediate effect, they could not be challenged via a referendum ballot measure.

As Prop. 25 was pending, then-Assembly Speaker John Pérez and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg issued a statement that, if passed, it “will not allow a majority of the Legislature to use budget trailer bills to enact new ‘referendum-proof’ programs or requirements,” adding, “Any attempt by this or any future Legislature to circumvent this right would be in clear violation of California’s constitution…”

In the 13 years since, hundreds of trailer bills have been enacted and many do contain major policy declarations that are referendum-proof.

This bit of legislative history is offered because the annual budget process is underway and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Department of Finance has just released a list of 77 trailer bills that would be attached to his 2024-25 budget, although their precise contents are far from determined.

That’s just the beginning because before the budget is passed in June – and even after it’s enacted – other trailer bills will continue to surface. In fact, we’ll probably see some new trailer bills attached to the 2023-24 budget, which was passed last June, as Newsom and the Legislature try to shrink its multibillion-dollar gap between income and outgo.

The opportunity for political mischief looms large.

CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to Commentary.