SACRAMENTO — Following months of fast and furious speculation, secessionist plots and preemptive actions from left-leaning California politicians, it gets real Friday: Donald Trump will become the president of the United States.
And he’ll also be the president of 39 million Californians — thousands of whom took to the streets in protest days after his election.
The inauguration follows months of fast and furious speculation, secessionist plots and preemptive actions from left-leaning California politicians in anticipation of this moment.
During the Obama administration, Sacramento and Washington were on the same page. Now, observes John Yoo, a conservative professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, California is “going to know what it was like to be Texas for the past eight years.”
Many residents of this bright-blue state are bracing for a number of possibilities: Will Trump scale back environmental protections in the name of economic development? Will he torpedo the Affordable Care Act, which has provided health insurance to 5 million more Californians — and what will he offer to replace it? Will he use his executive power to put hundreds of thousands of young immigrants at risk of deportation, undoing the protections President Barack Obama gave them in 2012?
Xavier Becerra, Gov. Jerry Brown’s choice for state attorney general, spoke figuratively this past week of the “weapons” the state has to defend itself against 
federal meddling. And top-ranking Democratic lawmakers have hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to help mount a legal strategy on climate change, immigration, offshore drilling and other policies that might face challenges.
Many GOP legislators are concerned about the fighting words coming out of Sacramento, arguing that many top Democrats appear to be overreacting. “We need to find areas where we agree — and I think there are some opportunities there — before we start looking at how we can be as far apart and combative as possible,” said Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, of Dublin, the Bay Area’s only Republican state legislator.
Some legal experts, however, say that the state is wise not to wait for the president-elect to make the first move. Taking stock of its rights is a smart move for any state whose policies are in conflict with Washington’s, said David Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.
“If I’m the governor or the president pro tem of the state Senate,” Carrillo said, “right now I’d be laser-focused on the California constitution to figure out how I can circle the wagons around the issues Californians care about.”
States have the power to protect some of the individual rights they have granted their citizens, such as the right to marry people of the same sex. They can also uphold strict environmental regulations and other state laws that don’t violate the U.S. Constitution.
But while California has its rights, it also relies heavily on federal dollars — a whopping $105 billion in the coming year alone — that routinely come with strings attached. And that leads to another big question: Will the president-elect, who is not known to let perceived slights go unanswered, team up with Congress to hit California where it hurts?
Here’s a look at some of the high-stakes battles that could erupt into a full-blown war during Trump’s first 100 days in office:
Sanctuary cities
Speculation has swirled around the loss of funding to so-called sanctuary cities and other local governments that have adopted policies to shield undocumented residents from deportation. The policies have been controversial; even many liberal Bay Area residents believe the policies have protected violent criminals who should be deported.
Some legal experts, however, say funding cuts to sanctuary cities are unlikely to happen. ACLU attorney Jonathan Blazer notes that Congress has tried several times to defund sanctuary cities, but the attempts failed even when both the Senate and the House were under Republican control.
Since Trump’s election, Blazer said, the number of California cities passing pro-immigrant resolutions has increased. “I don’t think that the localities are cowering in the face of this threat by and large,” he said. “They’re ready for a fight.”
Obama had used his executive authority to unilaterally grant temporary relief to hundreds of thousands of young people in the United States whose parents brought them in illegally when they were children. Trump has promised to scrap the program, known as DACA (for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), just as quickly — which he can do without the support of Congress.
“We’re preparing for all possible scenarios,” said Ignacia Rodriguez, immigration policy advocate at the National Immigration Law Center.
Climate change
One of the most high-profile areas where California will clash with the new Trump administration is on the environment, particularly global warming. Trump has called climate change “a hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese to harm America’s business competitiveness. Gov. Brown has called it an “existential crisis” and a top priority for California, citing concerns in the years ahead about increased forest fires, flooding from rising sea levels and melting of the Sierra Nevada snowpack.
Trump has nominated people to top jobs who are skeptical of the scientific consensus about global warming. Brown has emerged as a de facto second president of the United States on climate, taking his constituents in a completely different direction.
“We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight,” Brown thundered earlier this month in a speech to the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference in San Francisco.
The president-elect also has said he will push for more oil and gas drilling on public lands and offshore, arguing that it would move the nation further toward energy independence. Brown, however, has urged Obama to use his executive authority under a 1953 law to ban all new oil and gas drilling off the California coast before he leaves office.
“I’ve always been aware that if an administration with an environmental ethic went away, you’d have pent-up desire from the oil industry to get in there,” said activist Richard Charter, a veteran offshore oil activist in Bodega Bay with the Ocean Foundation.
‘Obamacare’
Congress passed a resolution late last week to begin the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. Trump and most congressional Republicans maintain that the law is a government takeover of health care and is about to collapse under its own weight because of skyrocketing insurance premiums.
But health care experts around the state say California has plenty to lose if ‘Obamacare’ is eliminated and the GOP doesn’t enact an effective alternative. They note that premium price hikes in California have been moderate compared to much of the country and that the Golden State has reduced its uninsured rate from nearly 19 percent in 2010 to 8.6 percent in 2015 — the biggest drop of any state in the nation over the last three years.
At least 5 million Californians are now insured — including 3.7 million, or 1 in 3 Californians — through a provision in the law that allows adults without children to enroll in Medi-Cal, the state’s health care plan for poor. Another 1.2 million are enrolled in private health plans through Covered California, the state’s insurance exchange — most of them receiving government subsidies that keep their costs down.
Jill Horwitz, a law professor and health policy expert at UCLA, said the state — which depends on at least $20 billion in annual federal funding for both private insurance subsidies and expanded Medi-Cal — could be left with few options. “Despite being so big and so powerful, we cannot go it alone,’’ she said.
The fight begins
Some see a long-running power struggle between the nation’s capital and its most populous state as inevitable.
“We are the state that gave Hillary Clinton her margin in the popular vote,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a veteran political analyst at the University of Southern California. “Why would Donald Trump think he’d have to do anything for California?”
Even one prominent Republican congressman said he had no problem with California politicians asserting the state’s constitutional rights.
“Although I obviously strongly disagree with them on policy, I think state legal challenges to federal action are healthy,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove. “This is certainly preferable to recent Democratic attempts to nullify federal law by refusing to obey or enforce it.”
But others are already weary of the battle — and Trump hasn’t even taken office yet.
“I just don’t like how the political climate is going right now,” said John Tarabini, a retired Silicon Valley marketing executive and lifelong Democrat who said he voted for neither Trump nor Clinton. “I’m tired of polarization — period. I think that rather than going out and buying brass knuckles, Sacramento should work with the new administration.”
