SACRAMENTO — California’s state budget has been awash in cash, as lawmakers this year enjoyed a $97.5 billion budget surplus — an excess amount that’s larger than the entire general-fund budgets of all but two states (New York and Texas). As…

SACRAMENTO, Calif — Lanhee Chen, the Republican candidate for California controller, was an ideal candidate for the little-known office. His Democratic challenger on Tuesday, Malia Cohen, seems ill-suited for it. Thus, Chen racked up every major newspaper endorsement — even from liberal…

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It’s no surprise that the union-allied Biden administration is using the federal Department of Labor to tip the scales on behalf of labor unions. I recently reported for The American Spectator on a new regulatory proposal that attempts to…

The New York Times includes a particularly illustrative anecdote in its recent analysis of California’s overrun-plagued and overall disastrous effort to build a high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. It involves efforts by the French national railroad,…

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A state can serve as a “laboratory” of democracy to “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in his dissent in an arcane 1932…

One of the grossest elements of Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez’s appalling rant — captured anonymously on tape, then published by the Los Angeles Times — was her apparent disdain for Mexicans with an indigenous background. She used the Spanish…