Driven by either genetic impulse or vocational training, politicians habitually brag about how they are serving those who voted them into office.<\/p>\n
Gavin Newsom is an obvious example. He and his minions issue a steady stream of statements, press releases, social media postings and YouTube videos patting himself on the back. As his time in office approaches termination, his media output has increasingly resembled that of the presidential candidate he\u2019s likely to become.<\/p>\n
However there\u2019s one California politician who tops even Newsom in the sheer volume of self-congratulatory utterances: Attorney General Rob Bonta.<\/p>\n
Scarcely a day passes without his tireless media team issuing a press release, social media blurb or video in which Bonta \u2014 whose official motto is \u201cStanding up for all Californians and fighting injustices as the People\u2019s Attorney\u201d \u2014 claims some achievement.<\/p>\n
His press releases alone\u00a0approach 500 so far this year, not counting many other media platforms.<\/p>\n
This week, Bonta has been a constant media presence at\u00a0a trial in Oakland\u00a0over allegations by California and three other states that Meta, parent company of Instagram and Facebook, designed its apps to\u00a0hook young users, \u201chold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and hide the truth from the public,\u201d as Megan O\u2019Neill, a Bonta deputy, put it in her opening statement.<\/p>\n
As the trial convened Tuesday, Bonta posted a video \u2014 ironically on Facebook \u2014 outside the courtroom, declaring \u201cToday, our teams went to court to lay out our case that Meta\u00a0designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and Facebook that lead young users to compulsive use.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite Bonta\u2019s constant deluge of media content, relatively little of it winds up being printed, posted or broadcast by California\u2019s professional political journalists, since most of it is puffery and simply not newsworthy.<\/p>\n
One might wonder if, during Bonta\u2019s five-plus years as attorney general, his office has ever lost a case?<\/p>\n
Once in a while, he will announce a legal setback of some kind, denounce the court that issued an adverse ruling, declare the merit of his position and promise to pursue an appeal. But such releases are rare and almost never acknowledge an out-and-out defeat.<\/p>\n
That brings us to what\u2019s called a \u201cclaims bill.\u201d It\u2019s legislation, drafted in his office and usually enacted with little or no debate, that appropriates state money to pay the winners in cases that Bonta has lost or settled.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0current claims bill, which is awaiting final approval as the 2026 legislative session nears adjournment on Aug. 31, would allocate $7.4 million to settle eight cases. They cover a variety of specific issues, but four of them are lawsuits that successfully challenged gun control laws.<\/p>\n
Newsom, Bonta and Democratic legislators have promoted a\u00a0bewildering array of such laws, many of them unique to California, but lawsuits by firearms enthusiasts have been succeeding in recent years. They rely on U.S. Supreme Court rulings upholding the Bill of Rights\u2019 Second Amendment that considers bearing arms to be a civil right.<\/p>\n
Two of the gun control cases Bonta lost dealt with concealed weapons permits and two with the state\u2019s restrictions on marketing firearms-related products to youths. The winners in the marketing cases contended that California\u2019s law violated free speech.<\/p>\n
Californians shouldn\u2019t have to wait for a hastily enacted claims bill to learn which cases Bonta\u2019s Department of Justice has lost. He\u2019s obviously not going to announce setbacks himself, so California should emulate the City of Los Angeles, which maintains a website that\u00a0gives Angelenos up-to-date information on lawsuits the city has lost\u00a0and the amounts involved.<\/p>\n
So far the website offers data on 12,024 such cases and $1.1 billion in payouts since fiscal 2020. It\u2019s transparency that counters political propaganda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Driven by either genetic impulse or vocational training, politicians habitually brag about how they are serving those who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[147],"tags":[544,10682,542,2182,55],"class_list":["post-196863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gavin-newsom","tag-california","tag-columnists","tag-gavin-newsom","tag-latest-headlines","tag-opinion"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117134258605507963","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}