Driven by either genetic impulse or vocational training, politicians habitually brag about how they are serving those who voted them into office.
Gavin Newsom is an obvious example. He and his minions issue a steady stream of statements, press releases, social media postings and YouTube videos patting himself on the back. As his time in office approaches termination, his media output has increasingly resembled that of the presidential candidate he’s likely to become.
However there’s one California politician who tops even Newsom in the sheer volume of self-congratulatory utterances: Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Scarcely a day passes without his tireless media team issuing a press release, social media blurb or video in which Bonta — whose official motto is “Standing up for all Californians and fighting injustices as the People’s Attorney” — claims some achievement.
His press releases alone approach 500 so far this year, not counting many other media platforms.
This week, Bonta has been a constant media presence at a trial in Oakland over allegations by California and three other states that Meta, parent company of Instagram and Facebook, designed its apps to hook young users, “hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and hide the truth from the public,” as Megan O’Neill, a Bonta deputy, put it in her opening statement.
As the trial convened Tuesday, Bonta posted a video — ironically on Facebook — outside the courtroom, declaring “Today, our teams went to court to lay out our case that Meta designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and Facebook that lead young users to compulsive use.”
Despite Bonta’s constant deluge of media content, relatively little of it winds up being printed, posted or broadcast by California’s professional political journalists, since most of it is puffery and simply not newsworthy.
One might wonder if, during Bonta’s five-plus years as attorney general, his office has ever lost a case?
Once in a while, he will announce a legal setback of some kind, denounce the court that issued an adverse ruling, declare the merit of his position and promise to pursue an appeal. But such releases are rare and almost never acknowledge an out-and-out defeat.
That brings us to what’s called a “claims bill.” It’s legislation, drafted in his office and usually enacted with little or no debate, that appropriates state money to pay the winners in cases that Bonta has lost or settled.
The current claims bill, which is awaiting final approval as the 2026 legislative session nears adjournment on Aug. 31, would allocate $7.4 million to settle eight cases. They cover a variety of specific issues, but four of them are lawsuits that successfully challenged gun control laws.
Newsom, Bonta and Democratic legislators have promoted a bewildering array of such laws, many of them unique to California, but lawsuits by firearms enthusiasts have been succeeding in recent years. They rely on U.S. Supreme Court rulings upholding the Bill of Rights’ Second Amendment that considers bearing arms to be a civil right.
Two of the gun control cases Bonta lost dealt with concealed weapons permits and two with the state’s restrictions on marketing firearms-related products to youths. The winners in the marketing cases contended that California’s law violated free speech.
Californians shouldn’t have to wait for a hastily enacted claims bill to learn which cases Bonta’s Department of Justice has lost. He’s obviously not going to announce setbacks himself, so California should emulate the City of Los Angeles, which maintains a website that gives Angelenos up-to-date information on lawsuits the city has lost and the amounts involved.
So far the website offers data on 12,024 such cases and $1.1 billion in payouts since fiscal 2020. It’s transparency that counters political propaganda.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist