Yesterday on the show, I felt a little ambivalent to flip floppy. I was reading through a piece about what a Trump administration could do to impact California and specifically California housing, and I sort of came to the conclusion that there's not necessarily a ton that Trump could do. There's certain things, maybe, but there's just not a lot through executive action that Trump could do that's going to counteract the layers and layers of state law and state
regulation that make it difficult for builders to build. Clearly, housing affordability as a priority for the administration, but what the federal government can do to pierce all these layers of California law, I'm not exactly sure. However, another area of California life, very important for us in the San Joaquin Valley is agriculture, and there is more that Trump could potentially do to benefit California farmers. All of you
listening to this from Vicelia up through Modesto. There's a lot of important stuff that a Trump administration could do with agriculture and specifically with water. So this actually relates to so I think it's always good to do this on a semi regular basis, just to give a summary
of California water and kind of how it works. So water in California, the reason why we are able to have water is because of rivers and then pumping the water from the rivers down south from the Bay area south through a series of man constructed waterway systems that help bring agricultural water for our fields in the San Joaquin Valley and which helped transform the San Laquin Valley fortify the San Joaquin Valley into the greatest food production
engine the world has ever known, as well as pumping water down so that people who live in Los Angeles can shower and get water from their sink and water to drink at the tap, and all of that even if they live somewhere like Palm Springs or Palm Desert or something. So water flows out of the mountains into the San Joaquin River for most of us here in San Quae Valley, and the Sacramento River for folks up
north in the Sacramento Valley. Water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers comes to meet and then it branches off into a bunch of gazillion little tributaries that flow out into the San Francisco Bay. The series of little tributaries that flow out into the San Francisco Bay are called the delta. It's called a delta from the Greek letter delta, which is shaped kind of like a triangle. So a river delta is where the river sort of splits into a bunch of little branching off tributaries as
it flows into the ocean. The Nile River has a delta, for example, so it kind of looks it looks kind of like a triangle from one way of looking at it. So at the delta. Instead of the water all just flowing off into the ocean, we take that water and we pump it south. We pump it south into two one of two different Now, now much of it does, yes, just flow out into the ocean, but much of it we take and we pump south into one of two different man made water transport canal systems. The one is
the California Water System. The California Water System, as you can tell by its name, is managed by state agencies of the state of California. It takes this water and largely what this water is used for is for southern California residential use. And there are kind of three uses that you can have for water. There's normal like residential use, so water that is in the tap and in your toilet and in your shower and et cetera. There's agricultural use.
And then lastly there is quote environmental use i e. Non use, letting the water just flow into the ocean. Letting the water flow into the ocean. Because the idea is the more water that exists in our waterways in the Sacramento River, in the San Juaquin River, in the Delta,
the more this benefits the fishies. Okay, and the fish populations in the Sacramento San Juaquin rivers and the Delta, many of them are protected by layers of either the Federal or the California and Endangered Species Act, and this has been the source spot for water anyway. So the water from the Delta gets pumped south either in the California Water System, which is usually for resident which is much of which is used for residential water in southern California.
And then there's another waterway system that starts at the Delta and water gets pumped south, which is the Central Valley Water System. This water system was built during World War Two by the federal government and is to this day controlled operated by the federal government by various federal agencies. This water system, its chief use is water for agriculture in San Jaquin Valley. Now that's sort of the basics of water in California, and the big difficulty there's been
difficulties with water in a number of respects. One is how much water are we diverting for environmental purposes i e. Helping keep salmon and delta smelt and other fishy species alive versus residential and agriculture use. So the idea being, well, there's a more or less finite supply of water in any given year, and the amount of water you have is determined by how much rain you had, how much
snowmelt you have, et cetera. You have this finite amount of water, how much is going towards environmental use i eat. Not going to be used by humans for anything, either residential use or agricultural use. Secondly, we've had in California the problems of water storage. Yes, there are some years that are more dry where we don't have as much snow melt, we don't have as much rain, we don't
have as much water. If we were able to store our water for a non rainy day, then maybe we and be so much at the mercy of year to year this season fluctuations in precipitation levels. California hasn't wanted to build any more water storage in decades because again, California environmental law makes it so difficult to do. Any attempt to build some kind of water storage system or damming is met with furious environmental objections because dams usually
hurt the fishies. And this is also the problem, is that when we do have a really good year, we're not able to capture all the water from the good year. A lot of it is just beyond our capacity to capture and save. So we are wasting this opportunity to capture water that we could use again for a non rainy day. Now, in the first Trump administration, there were it was it was I heard it characterized this way by sort of Devin Nunez, who was a congressman at
the time. And now Nunez has been a close Trump confidante in the year since Trump left office. Trump made Devin Nunez the CEO of Truth Social and I guess I would not be shocked if Nunez winds up getting some kind of prominent role in the Trump forty seven administration as a result. I mean, he's managed to stay
very tight with Donald Trump. Nunez characterized it. I remember I went to some kind of water related event in I think it was down into Larry sometime in like twenty eighteen twenty nineteen that Trump had introduced the first set of either federal or state regulations that had actually resulted in more water delivery to farmers rather than le
us in forty years. So basically what Trump had done is the Obama era rules for water allocation, what is going to ag versus what is going towards environmental purposes
were very inflexible and draconian towards farmers. Environmental was getting a lot, farmers were not, and it was just under you know, it was based on federal regulatory agencies and environmental agencies looking at the state of different species that lived within the Central Valley System's waterways and in the delta, and then assessing for a whole year basically that only this much water will be pumped through the Central Valley
System for farmers. And it's based on this one assessment, and then you're locked into that assents basically for a full year, and farmers were getting short shrift. They just were not getting much allocated to them. When Trump came into office, he put in place regulations that actually, at least it was characterized to me, now, I'm not sure if maybe this is just Republicans trying to put a nice spin on it, and actually it wasn't more politicized
than this. But the messaging from Nunez et al. Was that agencies within the federal government were coming up with better and more scientifically grounded guidelines for water pumping, and the idea being well instead of just having one set amount that was going to be allocated for the full year, for the full time frame, instead, federal agencies would engage in continual, regular assessments of the health of different species within California waterways and would have the flexibility to pump
more or less depending on how things were going, which was going to result in more water going down for farmers. So instead of an inflexible, draconian standard that the Obama administration had, the Trump administration was basically giving more flexibility. Now, this was met with furious objection by the incoming Gavin Newsom administration. Who proceeded to sue the federal government over this.
Gavin Newsom taking the posture that he represents the fishies of California, not the farmers of California, or allegedly the fishies of Calumlifornia, and basically Newsome was sort of implacably opposed. He was just totally opposed to these Trump regulations. Now, when we return, we're going to talk through Dan Walter's piece in cal Matters and we're going to talk about what kinds of things Trump could do this second time around, how that relates to state government, etc. That is next
on the John Girardi Show. Dan Walter's the longtime columnist for the Sacramento b He runs Calmatters dot org. That's his outlet now and he's still, I think the most interesting, incisive commentator on California politics that we have. And he's got a great piece you can find out my Twitter page, Twitter dot com, slash Fresnojohnny at Fresnojohnny basically talking about California water, California agriculture and what a Trump administration could
do for it. He writes there are three policy issues particularly important to California's farmers that Trump wants to change. If he does what he has promised one one might benefit the industry and two might damage it. The beneficial change is what the California Farm Bureau President Shannon Douglas, in a post election statement, calls securing a sustainable water supply.
For years, state officials have been trying, either through regulatory decrees or negotiations, to reduce the amount of water san Juquin Valley farmers take from the San Juquin River and its tributaries to enhance flows through the Sacramento San Juan Delta, thus improving its water quality to support fish and other wildlife. So they're mad. The state officials are mad that farmers want water from the San Juquin River because they think
that hurts the fishies downstream in the Delta. That's the rub. Farmers are miffed that, after two wet winters filled the state's reservoirs, state Federal Water Manager still limited agricultural deliveries a few days because the state views farming as a blight upon the face of California. Maybe I might rant
about this later. A few days before the election, the State Water Resources Control Board issued the latest version of its water quality plan, but The supposed compromise is being critiqued by both farmers who want to minimize restrictions and environmentalists who demand a crackdown on water diversions. Trump stepped into the issue during his first presidency, directing federal water regulators to increase agricultural supplies, and is likely to do
so again. Just before the election, Trump described California water policy in all caps in all capital letters on his Truth social website as quote insane insane policy decisions, which he defined as the ridiculously re routing of millions of gallons of water a day from the North out of the Pacific Ocean rather than using it free of charge for the towns, cities, and farms dot it all throughout California. I can't really do a very good Trump, I'll just
keep it going. The two pending issues that could so Basically, Trump said, California has insane policy decisions that ridiculously re route millions of gallons of water a day from the north out of the Pacific Ocean rather than using it free of charge for the town, cities, and farms dotted all throughout California. The two pending issues that could backfire on farmers who voted for Trump. So okay, So that's
the positive. Is that Trump put in place these beneficial regulations for more water allocation for farmers the first time. He'll likely do it again. Trump clearly gets this issue. He clearly gets how ridiculous it is that we're just letting tons and tons of water dump out into the Pacific Ocean completely uselessly, while we have farms that are dying on the vine out Walters is China both sides
of it, he says. The two penning issues that could backfire on farmers who voted for Trump are imposing tariffs on imports from China, which could invite retaliatory tariffs on agricultural exports, and deporting undocumented immigrants, who comprise at least half of the state's agricultural workers. Despite objections from California's Republican congressional delegation, Trump hit China with tariffs during his first term, and China retaliated with import tariffs that target
US agriculture. According to a report from the University of California's Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, for almans and pistachios, the tariffs did not reduce the volume of uxx US exports to China, the report continued. However, the trade war diminished california exports of walnuts, wine, oranges, and table grapes.
Cracking down on undocumented immigrants has been a bedrock issue for Trump throughout his political career, and he's promised to make good on his deportation pledge immediately after taking office. For a variet reasons, the state's farmers have had difficulty finding enough workers to till and harvest their crops in recent years. Immigration restrictions, California's high living costs in the creation of new factory jobs in Mexico are among the reasons.
California has as many as two million undocumented residents. Gosh, I'd have to think it's more than that, many of whom work in industries ranging from construction to agriculture. The full blown roundup Trump promises would have an immense economic effect on the state, with agriculture arguably the most vulnerable.
When Central Valley farmers were enthusiastically backing a second term for Trump, they undoubtedly were hoping for relief from water restrictions, Yet that could be the smallest impact Trump two point zero may have on their industry. So this is Walter's kind of given both sides of it, which I think is fair. Personally, on the labor shortage front, I sort of hate. I sort of think I'm going through puberty
on the radio. I sort of think that all of the arguments that we need to keep illegal immigrants here because otherwise who will pick our grapes? Honestly, it kind of reminds me of Sparta in sort of the four hundred 's BC. Sparta was a horrifically unjust society that was built on the backs of slavery of the Helots. So basically, this city nearby Sparta that Sparta conquered, they made all of its residents and into slaves. Slaves, so it was like this whole slave society whose only role
was to exist as a prop for Sparta. The Helots were beyond second class citizens. They were a slave population who were sort of the bedrock of this two stratosphered society. Now it's not that bad, but the idea that we say, the idea that we're just comfortable saying, oh, we need to keep a legal immigration because otherwise who will do
all these crappy jobs. Well, boy, that's pretty classist, and that's pretty an egalitarian that we just leave all of our most difficult or dangerous or laborious jobs for people who are here in a perilous legal state, whom we can get away with paying dirt cheap wages and you know whatever, because they're not even really supposed to be here. I don't like that. I don't like this attitude that, you know, these are the only kinds of people who
can do this, and that this is somehow adjust set up. Secondly, I also just think realistically, there's gonna be enough people to pick. Okay, economic incentives are there. Farming is still a big business. They're going to find the people they need to pick stuff. Trump is not going to be able to deport all, you know, twenty million whatever it
is illegal aliens who are here. Clearly there's going to be some prioritization that has to happen, and it's probably not going to start with guys who are busy productively working. It's probably gonna start with people who've committed crimes here, people who recently came here illegally, et cetera. I just don't think that the impact on the labor market for agriculture is going to be so profound, so immediately, I
think water is the lifeblood of all of this. And if Trump can actually and the problem is, can Trump pierced through the fact that California could no could veto his efforts effectively through litigation. California just seems Newsome has signaled, Yep, we are going to be back in full on resistance mode. We don't want to comply or go along with absolutely one single dogone thing that the Trump administration wants to do. If he and Rob Bonta continue to take that posture,
I don't know that. I don't know that Trump's Even if Trump does put into place positive regulations to deliver more water, will it help you know? Will will it actually be effective at delivering more water? I guess we'll wait and see when we return. When the executive can't really be the executive an extensive thought on the Governor of California and the Office of the Presidency of the
United States next on John Girardi Show. This is going to be a bit of an extended ramble, and it's about the executive branch, the executive branch of the federal government and the executive branch of the State of California. Over time, the executive spreads and spreads and spreads its power, and I think over the course of history, some of
that is sort of a natural progression. Over time, the government starts regulating more and more things, and it has to task the actual act of regulating or enforcing the regulations to somebody, and they give that task to the executive. And the executive can't do it all by himself. He's just one man who lives at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue
or at the governor's residence in Sacramento or wherever. And so executive agencies get formed more and more and more and more executive officials who exist to enact the will of the president. And there's always been this sense of, well, okay, we're creating these bureaucratic agencies, and they begin to take on a kind of life and a characteristic of their own. Because not everyone leaves the minute a new executive comes in.
People tend to have skills that are useful for that agency as it continues onward, and you know, Donald Trump leaves and Joe Biden comes in, and some people still
stay arnold. You know, Gray Davis gets recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger comes in, and it's seemed that there's some kind of benefit to some kind of ongoing continuity, that not everything every single executive agency does is totally a reflection of the changing political sentiment of the population, and that people can still be in that executive agency, still doing work without it violating the will of the people. Now, the problem is when that doesn't happen all the time.
We've sort of accepted this, not this fiction, but we've accepted this concept largely throughout the federal government. Okay, An, your rank and file FBI agent working at the FBI field office in I don't know, Pierre, South Dakota. He doesn't lose his job now because Donald Trump was elected and Joe Biden is going out of office. Yes, he is a federal executive brand NCH official. Yes, his authority is only an extension of the President's authority. But we
don't fire him. We keep him in office, and we think that's pretty reasonable. Your rank and file FBI officer is not setting policy for the FBI. He's not deciding who or how to enforce the law. He's just he's at the end of the line, taking orders in a fairly a political fashion, dealing with fairly a political nuts in Bolt's federal criminal law enforcement. And we think that's okay.
But as we get higher and higher up, the divide starts to happen at the level of director of the FBI, where we start to realize, hey, the FBI has been pretty darn politicized, and FBI directors, by the way, that the idea that James Comy when he was director of the FBI, that he was overly politicized not the first time that of the FBI has been wildly over politicized and viewed his role as a little fief dum unto himself.
J Edgar who I mean, that's why j Edgar Hoover was famous, notorious, infamous because of his meddling and all kinds of political things. And now there is a sense in which, however, federal executive agencies, Yes, they are supposed to be responsive to the president. They're supposed to do what the president wants. But there's a limit, right, the limit being the parameters of the law. And the parameters and that parameter is simply the law the FBI is
supposed to enforce. The law on behalf of the president. They can't do stuff that's just purely self serving to the president, and you get problems when that line gets blurred. Lyndon Johnson using the FBI to spy on his political foes or you know what have you? I think Johnson used the FBI to do that. I have to go back. There are all kinds of presidents who did wildly abusive things with the FBI. Now, so we've sort of accepted that some people should sort of stay on in their
executive branch roles even when an executive leaves. But the problems we saw in the Trump administration was that a huge percentage of the federal workforce, a huge percentage of the federal bureaucracy apparatus, was staffed by people who hated Donald Trump and who subverted the policy things he wanted to get done, slow rolled, it didn't work, put poison pill regulation into otherwise good regulations, actively undermined him. So that's a problem. The bureaucracy should not be fighting against
the president. The UH. There's a great tweet on this from Michael Brennan Doherty. He's criticizing these liberal commentators who are so upset that Trump wants to put quote loyalists in his various executive branch positions, when it's like, yeah, of course he should put loyalists in executive branch positions. He's the executive. All executive branch officials are his. Are there to put in place his policies. He can't have
executive branch officials who disagree with his policies. It's undemocratic to do so. So there's this guy Tom Nichols, used to be a conservative commentator and beca this heavily anti Trump guy who writes, if you want to subvert a democracy, the first three institutions you try to capture with loyalists are the military, the justice system, and the intelligence community.
Trump is on the offensive against all three, to which Michael Brendan Doherty writes for National Review wrote, if there is anything our founders wanted for us, it was a military and an intelligence community that would resist the elected executive. And he's right Doherty's pointing out how absurd this is. Of course, the founding fathers did not want the military to be opposing the president or telling the president no, or the intelligence community to be actively spying on and
acting against the president. No, of course not. That is the inversion of what democracy is supposed to be. Like I see these, like without blinking, these liberal stories coming out about like, oh, there will be no check within the executive branch on Trump's power. There's not supposed to be a check on the Trump's power in the executive branch. The only check on Trump's power in the executive branch is if Trump tells someone to do something that is flatly,
clearly obviously illegal, and then that person should resign. That's the only check. If it even is a check within the executive branch. The check on the president's power is from the other branches of government, the judiciary and the legislative branches of government. That's why the framers of the Constitution said, hey, we're only going to have a declaration of war if Congress votes for it, specifically, if the
House votes for it. I mean, that was the safeguard so that the president can't just use the militarrea has his own crazy toy. That's the check on presidential power. With regards to the military, a president using the military to fight a war without congressional approval is against the law. That's the check. Now, this caused me to think a little bit about California, and you know, I'll save it
for a final segment when we return. Even if Republicans elected a good governor of California, how much could he or she really do next? On The John Girardi Show, the thing I've been wondering. I've had a couple of segments on this show over the last two weeks here where I've been sort of speculating about what do these
election results mean for the future of California? And I honestly can see, for the first time in gosh, I don't know, almost the first time in my adult life, the first time post Arnold Schwarzenegger, I think I could actually see a window, an avenue for a Republican to win the governor's race in California. I think I can see a path. I think Republicans would have to pick
someone really good. I think they'd have to pick someone charismatic, well spoken, not easily labeled as a kook, someone relatable. I think the never ending cavalcade of white guys that you know, not that I believe in identity politics too much, but like politics is marketing, you're dealing with a populace that kind of is down with identity politics. And the fact is California has run just a never ending series of boring, nondescript white guys without much name, without either
much name recognition or significance. The only exception to that being Larry Elder, who in the recall election also got his doors blown off. But other than Larry Elder, there was no nothing other than white guys. John Cox, Brian Dolly, all this white guy after white eyved white guy for these senator and governor's races, and none of them make
it anywhere. So I think if you find a candidate, someone who is dynamic, someone who could maybe appeal to the emerging pro Trump Latino voter block that we saw gains for Trump among Latinos even in California, maybe there's someone who breaks the mold of the Orange County old white guy who could be an attractive candidate for governor. I think if someone could wrap him or herself in the mantle of Prop. Thirty six, that could be something
really significant. There were several issues where California was voicing it's getting tired with really extreme liberal policies that you could see that in twenty twenty four elections. Now, the thing is, though, even if we elected a Republican governor, what could this person really do. I talked about this in the last segment about the administrative state. It's not like the governor could actually totally change the administrative state, and even more so in California. Like you look at
the California Air Resources Board. The California Air Resources Board as a bunch of members who have multi year terms that are gonna outlast Gavin Newsome, and they have law enforcement power in California to regulate air quality stuff. I don't know that a new governor could just totally fire them right away, and that's an extremely consequential thing. He
could slowly, over time change it. But whether in four years he could undo what Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown have and the state legislature have done with the Air Resources Board over the last fourteen years, I find hard to believe. And that's the difficulty I see. No Republican governor of California is ever going to pass any legislation through the state legislature. No Republican governor of California is going to be able completely to bend the state to
something approaching sanity. Certainly there's some things he or she will be able to do, but not all. And really, I think the power of a Republican governor in California would be the sort of bully pulpit that he or she would have to try to get ballot initiatives passed. I think that's the main thing, to get ballot initiatives qualified and passed. We're only going to fix California if
we fix SEQUA, the California in Environmental Quality Act. We're only going to fix California if we can insist on adequate criminal law enforcement. We're only going to fix California if we can have actual solutions to homelessness that are outside of the solutions that our state legislature wants to consider. And maybe there's a governor candidate out there who could message this. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that there is.
It's remarkable, you know, I would love to see someone like Melissa Melendez, who's a Republican California state senator for several years, a Navy vet, if she would run for governor. I think there are people who could do it, and I think there's an actual avenue there that'll do it. John j Already show see next time on Power Talk