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WHAT I REALLY THINK -
“How dare they!” – Greta Thunberg
California’s elites are seeking and, in some cases, exerting supremacy over the United States. While a Civil War has not been declared, we face a very uncivil rebellion that is resisting every avenue of Federal authority. Politically, administratively, and culturally, California’s ruling class increasingly behaves as if it has more moral authority than the country that created it.
This is not old-fashioned secession, Fort Sumter style. It is subtler, more modern, and corrosive. It is rebellion via governmental defiance. It is nullification through litigation, sanctuary policy, bureaucratic obstruction, ideological enforcement, and the steady weakening of citizenship.
California still wants federal money, lots of it, because a $356 billion budget for fiscal 2026-27 is not enough. It wants federal disaster relief, funding for transportation, healthcare, education, housing, climate, and infrastructure. But when Washington attempts to enforce federal immigration law, secure the border, impose conditions on grants, reverse California’s special regulatory privileges, or hold the state accountable for failed projects, Sacramento rebels.
California wants the benefits of a union without the obligations of a union.
The best example is immigration. California’s Values Act, SB 54, was sold as a “sanctuary state” law. In practical terms, it limits the use of state and local law-enforcement resources to assist federal immigration enforcement, restricts transfers to immigration authorities, and places barriers on cooperation unless certain serious criminal exceptions apply. Los Angeles has gone even further. After years of informal sanctuary practices, the city codified a sanctuary ordinance. Which prohibits municipal resources, property, and personnel from being used for federal immigration enforcement.
They also point to the anti-commandeering doctrine: the federal government cannot simply force state and local officials to administer federal law. They are not wrong about that legal principle. The Supreme Court has said it. The Ninth Circuit has applied it. California has real constitutional space to refuse to be Washington’s enforcement arm.
But that legal defense does not answer the political question. There is a difference between saying, “We will not be commandeered,” and saying, in effect, “Federal law is morally illegitimate when we dislike the president enforcing federal law (especially DJT).” There is a difference between local discretion and organized resistance. There is a difference between federalism and permanent obstruction.
California crossed that line. When immigration raids hit Los Angeles in 2025, the conflict escalated. Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom did not treat federal immigration enforcement as national law being carried out within the state. They treated it as an invasion, an affront to local sovereignty, and a hostile act against California’s political authority and “humanitarian values”. The Trump administration responded by federalizing California National Guard units and deploying Marines after riots broke out. California sued. Federal courts limited the military’s role, and Judge Charles Breyer later ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using troops too closely tied to civilian law enforcement.
That ruling gave California a legal victory. But it also exposed the larger fissure. Washington claimed it was enforcing federal law. California claimed Washington had become an occupying power. Los Angeles treated immigration enforcement as a hostile act. Sacramento treated federal authority as something to be resisted, litigated, delegitimized, and delayed.
California’s soft secession is not limited to immigration. The state increasingly tries to govern the country through market access. It wants to dictate vehicle emissions standards, fuel standards, trucking rules, packaging rules, food-ingredient rules, animal agriculture rules, chemical warning labels, corporate climate disclosures, appliance standards, building standards, and internet privacy practices.
The mechanism is always the same: if a company wants access to California’s enormous market, it must obey California’s environmental preferences. In theory, these rules apply only inside California. In practice, they become national mandates because manufacturers, farmers, food companies, automakers, retailers, and technology firms cannot easily run one product line for California and another for everyone else. California does not have to pass a federal law. It simply makes the cost of noncompliance too high not to comply. That is how Cali turns its war on hydrocarbons into a national regulatory regime without a national vote.
California is engaged in bureaucratic nullification. It does not announce rebellion. It litigates. It delays. It obstructs. It funds parallel systems. It refuses cooperation. It hides behind the Tenth Amendment when convenient and demands federal money when useful. It accepts federal benefits while resisting federal priorities. It uses the courts not merely to test legality, but to exhaust and delegitimize federal authority.
The same pattern appears in infrastructure. California took federal money for high-speed rail, and after 18 years, not a single inch of track has been laid. When the Trump administration moved to terminate roughly $4 billion in federal funding, California called the move illegal and political. The state’s instinct was not accountability or fixing the problems, but to sue and claw back the money for a train to nowhere, which could ultimately cost $231 billion if ever completed.
This is the California model: take the money, resist the conditions, sue the funder, and call it principled. The Attorney General’s office has become central to this model, with 72 lawsuits against the Federal Government to date. The job of California’s Attorney General should be to protect Californians. Instead, the office too often operates as the Democratic Party’s department of lawfare against Washington.
Where is the same zeal for enforcing drug laws? Where is the same urgency regarding public corruption? Where is the concern regarding homelessness fraud? Where is the same outrage regarding Medi-Cal fraud and hospice scams? Where is the same resolve regarding election transparency? Where is the agitation regarding parents forced to fight school systems just to know what is happening to their own children?
California’s ruling class has unlimited legal energy for suing Washington, limitless funds and energy to protect illegal immigrants and fund their healthcare, and no interest in reducing taxes, fixing roads, or creating affordable energy. Or even cleaning up the raw sewage flowing from the Tijuana River into the San Diego area. Which is shocking since they say they are all about a clean environment.
Federalism means divided sovereignty within a constitutional order. States have real authority. They may challenge federal overreach. They may sue presidents. They may refuse to donate local manpower to federal programs. That is lawful. That is American.
But federalism also assumes loyalty to the constitutional order. It assumes states remain part of a national compact. It assumes citizenship means something. It assumes federal law, when validly enacted and lawfully enforced, is not optional merely because Sacramento dislikes the policy. California increasingly rejects that assumption. The greater danger is not merely sanctuary policy. It is the demotion of citizenship.
Los Angeles has already moved toward placing a charter measure before voters that would allow City Hall to advance noncitizen voting in municipal elections. This is sold with the usual vocabulary: inclusion, participation, community, voice. But voting is not a customer satisfaction survey. It is not a neighborhood comment card. Voting is an act of sovereignty. It is the formal power to choose the officials who make laws, spend public money, regulate property, control policing, impose taxes, approve bonds, and shape the civic order.
That power belongs to citizens. Noncitizens have rights. They have constitutional protections. They can speak, organize, protest, attend meetings, lobby, testify, and influence public debate.
But the vote is different. The vote is not merely a voice. It is power. Once California cities erase the distinction between citizen and noncitizen, citizenship becomes marginalized. The citizen becomes just another resident category inside a political coalition managed by activists, public-sector unions, nonprofit contractors, consultants, and permanent bureaucrats. The danger is that citizenship will cease to be the foundation of political authority.
California blurs the line between homelessness relief and the for-profit homelessness industry. It blurs the line between public safety and ideological experimentation. It now seeks to blur the line between citizens and noncitizens. It tries to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration. It blurs the line between school authority and parental authority. A perfect example is California State Sen. Scott Wiener declaring, "These are our kids," during a Pride Month speech in San Francisco. No, they are not “our” kids or your children. They are the parents' kids. Mr. Weiner, you are not raising them. You are not changing their dirty nappies, paying for their orthodontics, chauffeuring them to school, or feeding them.
Meanwhile, Californians are living through civic collapse. Fentanyl is killing people on the streets. Homeless encampments have become permanent fixtures of urban life. Public transit is unsafe. Parents are fighting school districts over basic parental rights. Retail theft, brazen drug dealing barely hidden, flash-grab-n-trash mobs, street takeovers, and public corruption have become ordinary facts of life. Billions disappear into homelessness programs while encampments grow. Sacramento passes more taxes.
California’s rulers no longer respect citizenship; they see it as an obstacle to their political project. It has eighty-sixed the idea that law enforcement exists to enforce the law. It has nullified the idea that parents have primary authority over children. It has treated public money as its own private war chest. It has purposefully given up on the idea that elections must be simple, transparent, and trusted. It has rejected the idea that the federal government has legitimate authority when enforcing valid national law. Whatever this is called, it is not Americanism.
This is the soft secession. No fusillades of cannon fire. No declaration. No formal break. Just a state government slowly dissolving itself from the constitutional habits, civic duties, and national loyalties that make the USA possible.
What makes Gov. Slimy Hair, AG Rob Bonta, and all the self-important leaders think California’s wasteland of blue cities is better and more important than the Constitution, Congress, the President, and 49 other states? Whatever it is, it is world-class chutzpah.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
