Eric Holder is bringing his talents to the Golden State.
In a stark sign of the rising stakes in California’s brewing battle against the incoming Trump administration, President Obama’s former attorney general has been hired by Sacramento Democrats to help blunt anticipated federal changes on a broad array of issue areas, including the environment, health care and immigration.
Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon are well within their legal rights to bring on Holder. In making the move, they also very likely boast the support of most Californians — roughly two-thirds — who voted against Trump in November. (That includes a share of Republicans and Libertarians apt to support federalist resistance to would-be encroachment from Washington.)
At the same time, hiring Holder, even for the brief three-month term of California’s initial contract, is a clear provocation. It willfully risks putting partisan symbolism over substantive governance and further deepening the state’s divide between coastal elites and those inland.
It’s not as if Sacramento Democrats need outside help for leadership or spine. Brown proved that by tapping Rep. Xavier Becerra for state attorney general. No slouch he, Becerra knows well how business is done inside the Beltway. He represented downtown Los Angeles in Congress for more than 20 years. Just last month, he joined his fellow party leaders in throwing down a personal gauntlet of his own: “If you want to take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests,” he warned the Trump team, “then come at us.”
Nevertheless, for many Democrats well to Brown’s left, it’s impossible to overdo the preparations for battle. Of course, lawyering up has long been a proud tradition among us combative Americans. Yet more than steely self-interest is visible in Holder’s hiring. Speaker Rendon, for instance, called Trump’s election a “major existential threat” on par with World War II and the Cold War. Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-Marin, has introduced a resolution that accuses Trump of pursuing “ethnic cleansing” — through deportation, a policy president Obama took to new heights while in office.
Extreme claims like these will prove much more effective at fomenting public rage and entrenching harmful conflict than at keeping popular and established state policies in place. And though many Californians would welcome Obama setting up shop in Rancho Mirage and helping keep the new administration at bay, state Democrats risk exaggerating their national party’s disadvantageous regional imbalance by rallying around Holder with a progressive movement that insists Donald Trump is “Not My President.”
Trump did win the White House — by running as an unprecedented kind of candidate. That means he’s in for a kind of opposition Americans have never quite seen before either. But bringing on Holder raises questions about just how aggressive California’s Democratic leaders are willing to get, whatever the cost to their state. When fighting more out of fear than principle, even popular policies backed by moral resolve can become distorted and damaging. In the weeks and years to come, state officials owe it to their constituents to proceed judiciously, transparently and calmly.
Editor’s note: This editorial has been corrected since it was originally posted. Gov. Jerry Brown was not involved in the Legislature’s hiring of Eric Holder’s law firm.