State Leaders Hit Back After Trump Threatens 'Out Of Control' California

LOS ANGELES, CA — The honeymoon, if there ever was one, is officially over. President Donald Trump called California “out of control” this weekend and threatened to deprive the nation’s most populous state of federal funding less than a month into his presidency. It was the second time in less than a week that he threatened to cut off federal funding to California; last week he threatened state funding after UC Berkeley cancelled a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart News, an outlet that championed his candidacy and gave him his chief strategist.

The confrontational stance comes as little surprise to California state leaders who have been vowing to resist Trump’s policies on everything from deportation to environmental and financial deregulation.

Still, the jarring context of the threat sent political shock waves around the world. In the same Fox News interview in which Trump defended the violence attributed to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, he went on the offense against California.

During a Super Bowl pregame show, Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly asked for Trump’s opinion on a bill authored by State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León that would bar police and sheriff’s departments from using local resources to enforce federal immigration laws. While dozens communities such as San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, Coachella and Santa Ana have declared sanctuary status, the bill would effectively make the state a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.

And it has the president fighting mad.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” he told O’Reilly. Sanctuary cities breed crime, claimed Trump.

“If we have to, we’ll defund," Trump said. "We give tremendous amounts of money to California. California, in many ways, is out of control, as you know.”

Trump said he’d be reluctant to withhold funding from California communities but added, “If they’re going to have sanctuary cities, we may have to do that. Certainly that would be a weapon.”

De León was quick to strike back in a statement released Monday.

“President Trump’s threat to weaponize federal funding is not only unconstitutional but emblematic of the cruelty he seeks to impose on our most vulnerable communities. Taking such irresponsible action would hurt our senior citizens, children, farmers, and veterans – these are not political games, these are real lives the President is targeting. States have a right to pursue their own public safety policies and no President with little knowledge of how a republic operates can change that,” he said.

“Far from being out of control, California is creating jobs faster than any other state and immigrants are key to our economic prosperity," he added. "We are an engine for the country’s innovation and job growth and our state annually pays more in federal taxes than it gets back. Our economy is the sixth largest in the world and thirteen percent of the country’s GDP. So any pain the President wants to cause in California will ripple nationwide.”

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom took to the president's favorite medium to offer his rebuttal. "According to @realDonaldTrump California is 'out of control.' Out here, we just call it 'basic morality,'" he tweeted.

In many ways, Trump’s is a hollow threat. It’s Congress that holds the nation’s purse strings. Furthermore, the withholding of federal funds can’t be arbitrary. Courts have ruled that the funding withheld must be limited to the policy in dispute, according to analysis by the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper sites welfare as an example of something that couldn’t be cut because of disagreement over deportations.

Still, the president and the state of California appear to be on a collision course, and the stakes are high. California is home to the nation’s largest population of undocumented immigrants, and Trump’s signature campaign promise was the deportation of millions of immigrants. He has incentive to take on the fight. Any withholding of federal funds, provided they pass muster in court, could have significant impact on local communities.

“We don’t know what it means,” Matt Cate, executive director of the California State Assn. of Counties told the Los Angeles Times. “But there’s enough there to make us legitimately concerned...The dollar amounts are large enough that cutting them could cause irreparable harm to the counties and their residents. So we’re uncertain and concerned."

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• Santa Clara County Sues Trump Administration Over 'Sanctuary Cities' Order
• California Leapfrogs France to Claim the World's 6th Largest Economy
• Did Trump Push California Over the Edge?

Image courtesy of the White House