California AB 1955 Ruling: New Rights Beat Fixing Potholes


Sacramento reportedly bets a fresh pronoun committee will pull voters' eyes off rent, gas, and an egg that now costs what a concert ticket used to.


SACRAMENTO, Calif. A federal court has just knocked the legs out from under one of California's signature laws, and the state's political class has responded the way it always does in a crisis. It has called a meeting. The plan emerging from that meeting, according to people who were handed a printed agenda and a lukewarm pastry, is to manufacture brand-new rights faster than voters can ask what the old ones cost to fix.

The trouble began with a federal appeals court decision blocking parts of AB 1955, the law that told schools to keep certain things from parents. The case came out of Huntington Beach. The lesson Sacramento appears to have drawn from it is that the public simply needs more rights it never requested, ideally three, plus a Department of Inclusive Feelings to administer them.

"Voters keep saying the word affordability," said campaign consultant Trevor Wainscott, standing beside a dry-erase board that still carried the ghost of last quarter's slogan underneath the new one, which read EMERGENCY IDENTITY TASK FORCE. "So we workshopped it. What if we gave them seventeen rights instead of a cheaper apartment? Test audiences loved the rights. They could not afford the apartment either way."


Symbolic Battles Cost Far Less Than California Housing


The appeal of a symbolic fight is that it never requires a backhoe. Fixing a road means closing a lane, hiring a crew, and explaining to a contractor why the budget arrived as a haiku. Launching a task force requires only a conference room and somebody willing to take minutes. One of these things shows up in a campaign ad. The other shows up in your suspension.

"Asphalt is expensive," explained Professor Amelia Crenshaw, of the Institute for Governmental Diversions. "Moral superiority ships free and never goes on backorder."

The result is a government that behaves like a restaurant whose kitchen is on fire while the manager gathers everyone to discuss the typeface on the menu. The diners are leaving. The manager is very pleased with the new font.


California Residents Start Asking Inconvenient Questions


Out in the actual state, residents have developed a dangerous habit of asking questions that do not fit on a lawn sign. Can a normal person afford rent. Why does a gallon of gas cost more than a decent bottle of bourbon. Will the insurance company still exist in the spring, or has it already packed a U-Haul for Reno.

Mike Hargrave, who has been babying the same front-left tire since a crater opened on Magnolia near the 405 and never closed, says the disconnect set in fast. "We showed up to the meeting about the roads," he said. "Forty minutes later everybody was arguing about definitions and the road was somehow worse. I came for the plot hole in the budget. They gave me a pothole and a pamphlet."


Pollsters Find Voters Oddly Interested in Daily Life


Internal polling reportedly delivered grim news to the strategists. Ordinary families spend a vanishingly small slice of their week debating theory and the overwhelming remainder worrying about groceries, the mortgage, and whether the twenty-six-year-old in the garage will ever locate a lease.

"We had twelve speeches ready on identity and not one on eggs," said an exhausted aide. "Do you know what an egg costs now. It is the kind of thing Jerry Seinfeld would build four minutes around. What is the deal with a carton that requires financing."


When Theory Fails, Sacramento Orders More Theory


There is a reflex among the state's professional thinkers that resembles a mechanic trying to fix a transmission with a sociology reader. When a policy fails, the conclusion is never that the policy was wrong. The conclusion is that the public has not yet attended enough seminars.

One activist arrived at a recent forum waving a thirty-one-page pamphlet titled The People's Revolutionary Guide to Parking Enforcement, which by page nine had a footnote, and by page nineteen had a footnote about the footnote. "When reality disagrees with the theory," offered local philosopher Earl Jennings, "we keep the theory. Reality has a way of being insufficiently enlightened, and besides, the theory already has a logo."


Hollywood Passes on the Sacramento Screenplay


A streaming service reportedly passed on a drama set in California politics on the grounds that no audience would believe it. The note from the development executive ran longer than the script. The governor solves inflation by announcing a commission, the note read, and we just cannot get there emotionally. In the third act a senator forms a working group to study the working group, and our test viewers laughed, which is a problem, because it was supposed to be the part where they cry.

The project was reclassified as absurdist comedy. A subcommittee was then convened to determine whether the reclassification itself qualified as art. It meets Thursdays at two, after the catered lunch, and has not yet reached the part of the agenda where anyone decides anything.


Economists Warn You Cannot Subsidize Reality


Economists keep showing up to remind lawmakers that prosperity comes from people making things, people investing in things, and businesses that have not yet relocated to a state with fewer forms. They point to the homeowners insurance market, where price controls met arithmetic and arithmetic won going away.

"You cannot regulate your way to abundance," said economist Linda Mercer, in a sentence that has never once survived a budget hearing.

"We respectfully disagree," replied a legislator. "We have formed a committee to investigate gravity, and early findings are encouraging."


California Voters Show Unhelpful Independence


The deeper problem, operatives confess in private, is the voters themselves. They keep holding two ideas at the same time, which the focus-group software is not built to handle. A parent in Huntington Beach can want to know what is happening with her own kid and also want the kid down the street kept safe, and she will say both in the same breath without apologizing for either. The software flags this as a malfunction. The parent calls it Tuesday.

"They refuse to fit the commercial," sighed one consultant. "Democracy would run so much more smoothly without the public in it."


Sacramento Promises Even More Symbolism


Undeterred by the court, undeterred by the polling, undeterred by the visible road, officials vowed to keep producing legislation with the bottomless enthusiasm of a Labrador near a tennis ball. "We are one bill away," an assemblyman declared, as he has declared every year since the bills had typewriters. Veteran Californians nodded the way you nod at a weather forecast. They have heard the promise since disco, and they have the suspension repairs to prove it.


Stanford Identifies Acute Legislative Hyperactivity


Researchers at Stanford announced the discovery of a previously uncatalogued condition they are calling Acute Legislative Hyperactivity. Sufferers draft bills before their coffee cools, convene commissions to oversee existing commissions, and grow visibly anxious whenever a citizen is left unsupervised for more than a few minutes. As Ron White likes to point out, you cannot fix stupid. Sacramento, true to form, has chartered a panel to confirm it, named a vice chair, and requested a second study in case the first one is too cheerful.

Here is the part the jokes keep circling. The people in Huntington Beach who started all of this were not chasing a culture war. They were parents who wanted to know what was going on with their own children, which used to be the least controversial sentence in the language. And the man on Magnolia is not asking for a seminar. He is asking for a road. Somewhere between those two requests sits a government that has gotten very good at the symbolic and strangely helpless at the literal, and the gap between the two is roughly the size of the crater near the 405. You can drive around it. You should not have to.

The court fight is real even if the Department of Inclusive Feelings is not. On June 19, 2026, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judges Daniel Collins, Kenneth Lee, and Lucy Koh, granted a preliminary injunction blocking key sections of AB 1955, the 2024 law authored by Assemblyman Chris Ward and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, which barred school districts from requiring staff to notify parents about a student's gender identity. The City of Huntington Beach and a group of parents, represented by America First Legal, brought the case, City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, after the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta signaled that such secrecy policies likely violate parents' constitutional rights. Attorney General Rob Bonta and State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, who defended the law, are appealing. It all plays out against a genuine cost-of-living squeeze: carriers such as State Farm have pulled back, the state's last-resort FAIR Plan has swollen and sought double-digit rate hikes, and the price of housing, gas, and groceries remains the question Sacramento least likes to answer out loud.

For the British dispatch on governments that can legislate everything except competence, cross the pond to The London Prat.

Disclaimer: This is American satirical journalism, written by two stubbornly human collaborators: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major who swapped the lecture hall for a milking parlor. Any resemblance to real task forces, blue-ribbon panels, steering committees, or emergency feelings summits is coincidental, and almost certainly already funded through the next fiscal year. 🥛📚😄

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