California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) threatened Friday that his state would stop tax payments to the federal government, after news reports suggested President Donald Trump was thinking of cutting funds to the state.
As Breitbart News noted earlier in the day, reports emerged suggesting that the Trump White House was considering cutting federal funding to California due to its challenges to, and defiance of, federal policy.
Breitbart News reported:
President Donald Trump is reportedly considering ways to pull more federal funding from the State of California, as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) continues to defy White House policies, despite needing money.
California is suffering a large budget deficit for the second year in a row, with the state’s Medicaid program borrowing money to stay afloat. Newsom has also asked the federal government for $40 billion in fire relief.
But Newsom is also enthusiastically suing the Trump administration over many of its policies, often seeking the kinds of nationwide injunctions that would stop those policies everywhere, not just in California.
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Trump had already threatened California’s federal sports funding after the state defied a federal transgender policy that bars biological males from competing in girls’ sports. And this week, the U.S. Department of Transportation suggested the administration could claw back billions of dollars in federal spending wasted on the state’s troubled high-speed rail project.
But Democrats have argued that California should be allowed to oppose federal policies while benefiting from federal spending, especially given the state’s large contributions to federal revenues. And they have pushed back against the idea of conditioning fire aid on policy changes.
It is not clear what constitutional authority Newsom has to withhold federal taxes on behalf of individuals, businesses, and other entities within the state. Trump’s authority to withhold funding is far clearer.
A tax revolt by California would recall the “nullification” doctrine popular in some Southern states before the Civil War. It could also trigger a tax revolt by Californians against their own state taxes, which are very high.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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