GUESS WHO’S BACK: Those who were in Sacramento during Donald Trump’s first administration may be experiencing a bit of déjà vu this week. Gov. Gavin Newsom today announced he’ll call a special session to begin proactively resisting Trump’s policies, our Wes Venteicher reported. Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas were immediately on board. "California has come too far and accomplished too much to simply surrender and accept his dystopian vision for America," McGuire said in a statement. Newsom noted plans to prepare for potential Trump action on abortion, disaster aid, electric vehicles, family separation and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The governor also wants lawmakers to set aside more money to help Attorney General Rob Bonta and state agencies shore up their efforts to take on the new presidential administration. Sound familiar? The day after Trump’s first victory in November 2016, then-Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León famously issued a joint statement in English and Spanish saying they “woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California.” They similarly vowed to fight Trump’s agenda during the first meeting of the new session that December — usually a ceremonial affair to swear in the new members — passing a resolution against potential mass deportation and anti-immigrant policies. Their efforts eventually led to legislation like SB 54, which prohibits state and local law enforcement from engaging in immigration enforcement and limits cooperation with federal immigration officials. (The Supreme Court in 2020 declined to review a lower court ruling upholding the law , and the courts blocked a Trump administration effort to withhold law enforcement funding from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions.) Another 2017 law barred landlords from sharing tenants’ immigration status or threatening to report them to federal authorities. The contours of the next Trump-resistance campaign are still taking shape and will depend on state leaders' appetite for taking on the president-elect and his second administration. Republicans quickly stepped into the role of resistance to the resistance, which Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones called “just another political stunt, a desperate attempt to distract from Democrats’ significant losses across California on Tuesday.” Assemblymember Bill Essayli rather counterintuitively called for Congress to “strip California of all its federal funding until it complies with our immigration laws.” “Not a penny to sanctuary states!” he said in an X post. Assembly Democrats caucused in Sacramento at the Citizen Hotel this afternoon, a meeting that had been in the works since before Trump’s victory. The gathering drew incumbents and soon-to-be lawmakers — even labor icon Dolores Huerta, whom Playbook spotted leaving the hotel. The special session came up, although the lawmakers whom Playbook approached declined to share details. Some members prior to the meeting said they were unaware a special session had been called, having spent the morning in transit. Assembly Budget Committee Chair Jesse Gabriel told Playbook the session would be narrowly tailored to address Newsom’s funding requests for the Department of Justice and other state agencies. “If things go in the direction that a lot of folks think they will, there will be other legislative proposals, other budgetary proposals,” he said. “This is an initial thing that requires speed and precision.” Marc Berman of Menlo Park, who was first elected to the Assembly in 2016, said things feel different from eight years ago because now “we know how bad it's going to be.” “Eight years ago the morning after, I still had hope that Trump would moderate, or that he'd be surrounded by actual adults and professionals that would stop some of his worst impulses,” Berman said. “Now, not at all. He's going to be surrounded by a bunch of sycophants that are going to be constantly encouraging him to go more and more extreme, and he will. And so it’s worse.”
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