The Trump Obsession Comes for California’s Water.
Tomorrow, the Golden State’s Democrat-run, veto-proof legislature returns from its summer break and is expected to quickly take up S.B. 1, the “California Environmental, Public Health, and Workers Defense Act of 2019.” It has been proposed for one reason: Donald Trump is president. Under his administration, long-standing EPA regulations and analyses, and bureaucratic (state and federal) actions, related to water have been rethought, reviewed, and relaxed. Which comes to the progressive Left as a threat: All that water-denying is now at risk.
Hence the bill.
Its consequence will be to preempt any possible forthcoming federal regulations that would result in people and farms (instead of, seriously, the Pacific Ocean) getting more, already available water. That might even be its purpose: For years, California’s bureaucrats, who are even more radical than Obama-era natural-resources federal regulators were, have shown great determination to deny the flow of fresh water from mountain snowpacks, watersheds, and reservoirs to the famous the Central Valley, which, when supplied H2O, puts fruits and vegetables on the world’s tables.
As Jack Fowler adds at NRO, “Recommended reading: Two excellent pieces that explain just what’s going on are Victor Davis Hanson’s City Journal essay ‘California’s Water Wars,’ and Charlie Cooke’s NR report, subtitled ‘For the sake of a smelt, California farmlands lie fallow.’”
h/t ED