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Trump Attacks Voting Rights and Federal Funding in California [1]
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Date: 2025-01-26
by Mark C. Eades
We all could have easily predicted that, if Republicans regained control of the federal government, voting rights would come under attack nationally just as they already have in Republican-controlled states. U.S. elections have been under attack for years by Donald Trump and other Republicans, and Trump has said that he wants early and mail-in voting eliminated entirely. Now, only days into his second term as president, the first shot of the Trump 2.0 war on voting rights in blue states has been fired, with Trump threatening to deny federal disaster aid to California unless it adopts voter ID requirements that he wants. It won’t stop here.
I am a California voter currently living and working overseas and voting by absentee ballot with a permanent home address in the San Francisco Bay Area. Previously, I spent many years voting in-person in the Bay Area. The State of California goes out of its way to make it as convenient as possible for eligible voters to vote while at the same time maintaining secure elections. California also conducts its elections fully in compliance with federal law, which leaves voter ID policies up to states to decide.
This doesn’t work out so well for Republicans, however, because California is one of the most urban, most diverse, and bluest states in the country, so naturally they would like to make it harder for Californians to vote. Any time Democrats in Washington make any attempt to protect voting rights or make it easier to vote, Republicans call it a “power grab” and accuse Democrats of trying to “federalize elections” and strip states of the right to run elections as they see fit. When it comes to “states’ rights” however — as with everything else — Republicans are the biggest hypocrites in the world. For Republicans, “states’ rights” are only for red states. For Republicans, while it’s perfectly okay for red states to restrict voting rights, abortion rights, or any other rights you care to mention, it is not okay for blue states to do the opposite. Now that Republicans have regained unified GOP control of all three branches of the federal government, expect an all-out attack on civil rights in blue states, beginning with California, the place that Republicans love to hate more than any other place on earth.
If Republicans can impose red-state voting restrictions on the entire country, they can cut into Democratic majorities in solid-blue states like California, turn marginal blue states into swing states, and turn swing states into red states, thereby expanding and consolidating their control nationally. Currently in red states, voting restrictions are designed to specifically target voters in densely-populated urban areas like Atlanta and Houston, in communities of color, and on college campuses, because these are the places where most Democratic votes come from. Any federal voting restrictions that Republicans try to impose would likewise be designed to target these voters in blue states and swing states. In California, Republicans would love to make voting in L.A. and San Francisco as difficult and time-consuming as it is in Atlanta and Houston. California and other blue states should be prepared to fight off these attacks by any and all means at their disposal.
On the matter of federal funding, this is not the first time that Trump has threatened to cut off California and other blue states, nor is Trump the only Republican who has said or suggested that federal funding should be cut off from California. Recently, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama — possibly the dumbest person ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, and one of the dumbest people ever to serve in either house of the U.S. Congress — said that L.A.-area wildfire victims “don’t deserve anything,” simply because most of them are Democrats who vote for “inner-city woke policies” that Republicans hate. As Edith Olmsted observed at The New Republic, Tuberville “didn’t blame all Californians. Just the liberal ones living in cities.” As Olmsted notes, Tuberville himself acknowledged that there are Republicans in California who are “good people,” unlike those bad people in L.A. and San Francisco who are Democrats and “don’t deserve anything.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also said that federal disaster aid for California should come with political “conditions” imposed by Republicans. “The House speaker is ready to commit political blackmail,” Edith Olmsted observed at The New Republic, and “is planning to use the wildfires in California as an opportunity to impose Donald Trump’s agenda.” California Governor Gavin Newsom responded to Johnson’s proposed conditions on eX-Twitter: “Mr. Speaker, when Louisianans need help after hurricanes, it's Californians -- many of whom have been impacted by these fires -- who foot the bill to help your constituents. And they do it without playing partisan games.”
Gavin Newsom raises an important point: California has the largest economy by far of any U.S. state — indeed the fifth-largest economy in the world — and provides more federal tax revenue by far than any other state. This includes the federal tax dollars that pay for federal disaster aid; and it’s not just because California has more people than any other state. Individual California taxpayers, on average, pay more federal income tax than those in most other states, because average incomes are higher in California than in most other states. This means that if you’re Donald Trump, Tommy Tuberville, Mike Johnson, or anyone else employed by the federal government, a larger part of your federal salary comes from California than from any other state.
According to the latest available IRS tax data (2023 — XLSX), California provides about 16 times as much federal tax revenue as Tommy Tuberville’s home state of Alabama, which means that about 16 times as much of Tuberville’s salary comes from California as from his own state. California doesn’t have 16 times as many people as Alabama, however: Currently, California’s population is only about 7.5 times the population of Alabama, which means that the average individual Californian generates about twice as much federal tax revenue as the average resident of Alabama; and therefore about twice as much of Tommy Tuberville’s federal salary per capita. This is not intended as a slight against the people of Alabama, but rather as something that Tuberville should consider before saying that Californians “don’t deserve anything.” Unfortunately, a U.S. Senator who doesn’t know what the three branches of the U.S. government are is probably also not mentally capable of considering who pays his U.S. government salary.
California also provides about 13 times as much federal tax revenue as Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana, and nearly twice as much federal tax revenue as Donald Trump’s adopted home state of Florida, which makes a similar point about where their federal salaries come from. Unlike Tommy Tuberville, Mike Johnson knows who pays his salary, but doesn’t care. And as independently wealthy as Trump may be, he does receive a federal salary of $400,000 per year from taxpayers, plus the ability to profit from unlimited taxpayer-funded golfing trips to his own private golf resorts. Taxpayers pay all of these people to do things for us, not to do things to us.
Disaster aid is not the only federal funding that the Trump GOP has threatened to cut off from California and other blue states. During Trump’s first term as president, he issued an executive order to cut off federal funding from “sanctuary jurisdictions” including sanctuary states such as California and sanctuary cities such as L.A. and San Francisco. The State of California and the City of San Francisco jointly sued the Trump administration in federal court, won the lawsuit, and Trump’s executive order was permanently blocked. Now, however, he is trying it again, with a new executive order issued on Inauguration Day to cut off federal funding from “sanctuary jurisdictions.” During the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, the Trump administration sought to cut federal funding from cities it considered “anarchist jurisdictions” including New York, Seattle, and Portland. These cities filed a federal lawsuit against the administration, but this fell by the wayside when Trump was voted out of office, and the new Biden administration revoked Trump’s “anarchist jurisdiction” designation of these cities.
Trump has also said that he will cut federal education funding to public schools that teach whatever he wants to call “critical race theory” (CRT) or considers an “unpatriotic” version of American history. This would certainly include public schools in California: In 2021, California became the first state in the country to add an ethnic studies requirement to the state high school graduation requirements. Predictably, conservative groups jumped on this as evidence of the “infiltration” of CRT into California public schools. In addition to CRT, Trump said that he will cut funding from schools that engage in what he called “transgender insanity.” This would also include public schools in California, since California schools have some of the country’s strongest protections for the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, including a 2024 law against “forced outing” of transgender students to parents.
Whenever Republicans want to attack civil rights or cut federal funding to states, they will probably start with the state that provides more federal tax revenue than any other state, which also happens to be the state that Republicans love to hate more than any other place on earth. They won’t stop with California, however, and blue states across America should be prepared to fight back..
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