Politics
New California water measures aim to increase fines for violators, protect wetlands
Under California law, anyone caught diverting water in violation of a state order has long been subject to only minimal fines. State legislators have now decided to crack down on violators under a newly approved bill that sharply increases penalties.
Assembly Bill 460 was passed by the Legislature last week and is among the water-related measures awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. Other bills that were approved aim to protect the state’s wetlands and add new safeguards for the water supplies of rural communities.
Supporters say increasing fines for violations will help the State Water Resources Control Board more effectively enforce its orders to curtail water use when necessary.
“It helps the water board enforce the laws that they have on the books,” said Analise Rivero, associate director of policy for the group California Trout, which co-sponsored the bill.
The bill, which was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), is intended to prevent the sort of violations that occurred in 2022 in the Shasta River watershed, when farmers and ranchers who belong to the Shasta River Water Assn. defied a curtailment order for eight days and diverted more than half the river’s flow, flouting requirements aimed at protecting salmon.
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The state water board fined the association the maximum amount for the violation: $4,000, which worked out to about $50 for each of its members. Those small fines didn’t deter farmers and ranchers from reducing the river’s flow to a point that threatened salmon and affected the supplies of downstream water users.
The case in Siskiyou County led to widespread calls for larger fines and stronger enforcement powers.
The legislation increases fines for violations of state water curtailment to as much as $10,000 per day, plus $2,500 for each acre-foot of water diverted. (An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, or enough to cover one acre a foot deep.)
“This bill closes that loophole and makes the existing law stronger, and it’s an important step in disincentivizing water theft,” Rivero said.
Rivero said being able to impose larger fines is important as California grapples with the effects of climate change on water supplies.
Leaders of a coalition of environmental groups urged Newsom to sign the bill. In a letter, they said enforcing harsher penalties for violators is crucial for the state water board to “fulfill its mission of protecting fish, water, and people.”
Bauer-Kahan said that for too long, breaking the law and paying the fines have been seen as the cost of doing business by some illegal water diverters.
“Although we did not go far enough in ensuring that our water rights system functions in times of scarcity, we did take an important step,” Bauer-Kahan said.
The legislation raises penalties to “better hold those who steal water accountable,” she said. “Water is a precious resource, and we must do everything possible to ensure its protection.”
Proponents of the bill made some sacrifices to secure sufficient support in the Legislature, dropping a provision that would have given the state water board authority to act faster in emergencies to prevent “irreparable injury” to streams, fish or other water users.
The result was a relatively modest reform, but one that serves an important purpose, said Cody Phillips, staff attorney for the group California Coastkeeper Alliance.
“Being able to get the California Legislature to agree to increase fines in water is a major deal for the practical consequences of preventing water theft, but also to show that we can change these important details about our water rights system, and the sky doesn’t fall,” Phillips said.
Other proposals have recently encountered strong opposition from agricultural groups and water agencies.
Phillips and other environmental advocates supported another bill, AB 1337, which sought to clarify the state water board’s authority to issue curtailment orders for all diverters, including senior rights holders that use a large portion of the state’s water. But that bill didn’t secure enough support to pass this year in the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.
“Water is often referred to as the third rail in California politics, and we’ve seen that any changes, even modest changes, like 460 and frankly 1337, are met with ferocious pushback,” Phillips said. “But we can’t avoid these issues — climate change, overallocation, they’ve all led to a system where the way that we deal with water just doesn’t work.”
Some legal experts said the bill is a step in the right direction.
“We know that water is the single most important resource in the state, and yet we do not have a clear understanding of who uses it, where, and when, and we do not have a robust system for correcting unlawful use,” said Jennifer Harder, a professor at University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law.
Harder said the state needs to continue improving collection of water use data and should adopt measures to improve oversight of water rights. She said she is optimistic that “local water suppliers will come to understand that state-level standards can support and enhance local management.”
One of the other water-related measures passed by the Legislature included a bill intended to protect California’s wetlands after the rollback of federal protections under a Supreme Court decision last year. The court’s ruling in Sackett vs. EPA rewrote the federal definition of wetlands and removed federal protections for many streams that do not flow year-round, leaving ephemeral streams vulnerable to development and pollution.
If signed by Newsom, the bill, AB 2875, will codify an executive order that then-Gov. Pete Wilson issued in 1993 establishing a state policy of “no net loss” of wetlands and calling for a long-term increase in the acreage of wetlands. Despite that policy, the state has continued to lose more wetland acres to development during the last three decades.
“We have wetlands that only flow certain times of year, and they are seasonal, ephemeral streams that were stripped of protections, and yet they are really, really important biologically and for habitat,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), who introduced the legislation.
Wetlands and a riparian forest are sustained by groundwater at the National Audubon Society’s Kern River Preserve.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Friedman and other supporters of the measure have stressed that because more than 90% of California’s original wetlands have already been drained and destroyed, strong protections for those that remain are vital. They say since the Supreme Court has scaled back the Clean Water Act’s federal protections for wetlands, the state will need to play a bigger role.
“We care about our state’s natural resources here in California, and it’s a shame that we right now have a Supreme Court that doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the kind of destruction that we’re seeing to our environment,” Friedman said. “It falls on states to really play whack-a-mole and catch up, because we have relied for a long time on existing, long-standing federal regulations.”
Scientists have documented major declines in North American bird populations since the 1970s, and they cite causes including the loss of habitats and warmer, drier conditions driven by climate change, among other factors.
The bill was sponsored by leaders of Audubon California, who called the measure an important step toward protecting wetland habitats that birds need to survive.
The bill doesn’t create a new regulatory framework but does make “a strong statement that California will protect and add wetlands,” said Mike Lynes, Audubon California’s director of public policy. “We’ve already lost so much of our natural wetland habitat. We’ve seen a decline in biodiversity, and there’s a ton of benefits by creating wetlands, not only for ecosystems, but also for flood control and for recreational opportunities, whether it’s birding, hunting, just hiking out in wetland areas.”
Another bill that was approved, AB 828, is aimed at improving safeguards for managed wetlands that are sustained by groundwater pumping, as well as rural communities that depend on wells. The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Damon Connolly (D-San Rafael), would allow these managed wetlands and small communities to temporarily continue to pump amounts of water in line with historical averages without facing mandatory reductions or fees imposed by local agencies under the state’s groundwater law.
Supporters said they proposed the change after several local agencies proposed groundwater allocations that would excessively limit supplies for communities or wildlife areas while also limiting pumping by agricultural landowners who are the largest water users.
“It sets a pause on pumping restrictions for small community water systems and managed wetlands, and on some fees, until those issues and their needs are considered,” Lynes said.
Some communities in the Central Valley have faced unworkable requirements to cut water use dramatically and start paying high fees for exceeding those limits, said Jennifer Clary, state director for the group Clean Water Action.
“We wanted a long-term exemption, but there was a lot of concern in the Legislature about that,” Clary said.
Doug Burgum highlights American innovation at Great American State Fair
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum joins ‘Fox & Friends’ live from the Great American State Fair in Washington. He emphasizes America’s legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, discussing the impact of AI and free markets. Burgum also addresses recent vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 22 and the upcoming July 4th opening of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is defending President Donald Trump’s many initiatives to address infrastructure in Washington, D.C., calling it a visible reminder that the country needs to actively press back against decline.
“Nations don’t crumble by fate — they decline by choice,” Burgum told Fox News Digital.
“From rehabilitating and installing historic memorials, statues, and fountains to removing hundreds of instances of graffiti and cleaning up crime on our streets, this administration is proving that American greatness is built through action,” he continued.
Burgum’s reasoning, which came ahead of the United States’ 250th Independence Day anniversary, addresses criticisms of the administration that have surfaced in recent weeks, casting doubt on whether Trump’s many renovation and construction initiatives in Washington, D.C. have been worth their price tag.
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Split of sample tests in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social)
As part of the 250th celebration, Trump has spent $14.7 million to restore the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, allocated $250 million to restore the Kennedy Center and is on track to spend over $400 million on the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Trump, in a Truth Social update about the reflecting pool, framed the efforts as part of a larger effort.
“We’ve cleaned, renovated and beautified over 45 monuments and memorials, 28 statues and 22 fountains in Washington, D.C. Things are really looking good in our nation’s capital. Add to that the fact that when I became president, crime was rampant. And now Washington, D.C. is one of the safest cities anywhere in the United States,” Trump wrote.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reacted during a meeting with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez at the Miraflores Presidential Palace on March 4, 2026, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)
The Department of the Interior, which has overseen many of the improvements, further updated its accomplishments ahead of July 4.
The city has removed 510 instances of graffiti, removed 154 homeless encampments, applied 212 tons of repair materials to roads and parkways, restored 280,000 square feet of roadway paving, rehabilitated 1,301 benches and fixed 1,913 lights.
Burgum said the repairs were emblematic of the administration’s aggressive posture towards addressing problems that had gone ignored in the past. In addition to these major improvements, DOI has restored and cleaned dozens of monuments and statues around DC.
DOI also recently helped transform Meridian Hill Park, which got high praise on social media by DC residents, into a desirable place to visit with a restored fountain that had been under construction for years with very little movement. They also cleaned and restored some of the statues in the park, including the Joan of Arc statue and the James Buchanan Memorial.
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Washington DC city workers dismantle tents and remove personal belongings during a sweep of a homeless encampment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, DC, on August 14, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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“While others accept decline, President Trump and the Department of the Interior are restoring the heart of our nation’s capital,” Burgum said. “The Golden Age of America isn’t just a slogan, it’s being rebuilt, one landmark, one street and one victory at a time.”
Politics
Commentary: Birthright citizenship ruling was a win for democracy — and a warning about erasing history
This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.
By some, anyway.
Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.
This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.
President Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”
“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.
Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.
“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.
Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
Signs sit available for protesters to demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court as President Trump arrives to attend oral arguments on April 1 in Washington, DC.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.
To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.
While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.
Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.
It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.
It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.
Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”
The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.
Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.
One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.
Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.
The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).
“There is a serious breakdown on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”
So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.
Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.
Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.
Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.
More chilling, and direct, were more comments from Miller.
“It’s an abomination,” he said of the ruling.
But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”
Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.
Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.
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President Donald Trump marked the eve of America’s 250th anniversary with a sweeping patriotic address at Mount Rushmore on Friday, declaring the United States the “most exceptional nation ever to exist” and vowing that it would “never be a Communist country.”
Speaking beneath the granite likenesses of four of his predecessors — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — Trump touted American exceptionalism as festivities marking the nation’s 250th anniversary ramped up across the country.
“In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” Trump told the crowd.
TRUMP KICKS OFF FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND WITH SYMBOLIC SALUTE TO AMERICA’S LEGACY
President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“At 250 years, America is the oldest republic on earth,” he continued. “We are the freest people on earth. We have the most righteous and enduring Constitution on earth. We are the strongest and most powerful country on earth. And by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”
Trump praised the nation’s history and argued that no other country had achieved as much as the United States.
“The birth and survival of the American nation under God is, quite simply, the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands, ever,” he said. “No other country has done more good for this world than the United States of America.”
AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN
Fireworks explode after President Donald Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Before Trump took the stage, the new Air Force One flew over Mount Rushmore as spectators cheered. After his remarks, the president stayed to watch a fireworks display over the Black Hills.
Trump argued the country was facing what he described as a growing communist movement that sought to undermine America’s “exceptional character” and “alienate us from our history.”
The president said the movement had raised the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
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President Donald Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Trump described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the United States.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.”
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil,” he continued.
“But we will not let them win,” he added. “They have no chance against us.”
Trump issued a clear directive: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
President Donald Trump speaks beneath Mount Rushmore during a celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As Americans face those choices, Trump pointed to the nation’s past sacrifices as a guide for its future.
“Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals and lunatics could come in and loot, pillage our nation,” he said.
Trump also highlighted the four presidents carved into the mountain behind him, saying they represented America’s founding ideals.
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence,” he said. “Above all, they were great men of history. Tonight, on the threshold of our 250th year, we stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people. And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants.”
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Trump is scheduled to deliver another speech Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. before a fireworks display celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“We know that this is not an ending,” Trump said. “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”
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