Four years ago, this Editorial Board surprised some readers by endorsing Bay Area Democratic Assembly member Rob Bonta for attorney general. We disagreed with Bonta on many policy issues, but were impressed by his vow to handle the office in an even-handed manner. After all, the integrity of our justice system is dependent on the AG’s fair administration of the Department of Justice.
We didn’t just take him at his word. Bonta had built a strong record in the California Legislature promoting criminal-justice reforms and backing useful police-accountability measures. His two predecessors — Kamala Harris, who later became vice president, and Xavier Becerra, who is likely to become California’s next governor — operated as tools of the state’s law-enforcement unions.
Forgive us the walk down memory lane, but it’s important to understand why Bonta was a breath of fresh air. His then-Republican opponent, Nathan Hochman (now Los Angeles County district attorney) opposed police decertification laws and staunchly defended civil asset forfeiture. To make matters worse, Hochman also went out of his way to stress he’d rigorously enforce California’s strict gun laws. That just made it easier for us to back the reform-minded Bonta.
This year, Bonta faces off against Republican Michael Gates, the former Huntington Beach city attorney and former Department of Justice official. Gates is no Hochman. He has been a key figure behind Huntington Beach’s performatively MAGA approach to city government. He has amassed an embarrassingly poor record in the courts as his city tried to defy state housing-deregulation laws, impose a Voter ID law and create a program to censor certain library books. This is not a record that inspires confidence.
His promise to return California to a “law-and-order state” is standard fare. But Gates has jumped head first into MAGA conspiracy-mongering as he sided with failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco, who in his role as Riverside County sheriff seized tens of thousands of ballots from the 2025 Proposition 50 (redistricting) election. That’s not very law-and-order. Indeed, the California Supreme Court just ruled Bianco acted unlawfully.
Yet we just can’t bring ourselves to endorse Bonta this time around.
For starters, Bonta has filed a number of lawsuits that are progressive cosplay. He led a 12-state lawsuit to stop the Warner Brothers and Paramount merger, which was based on an ideological reading of antitrust law. The ultimate settlement is tolerable, we suppose, but it suggests an eagerness to use state power to meddle in private business decisions. Along similar lines, he has filed a lawsuit against oil companies alleging that they misled the public about climate change, which may be smart politics in California, but bad policy. Such politically driven litigation can cause real economic damage.
One of the biggest reasons we backed Bonta four years ago was his commitment to police accountability. But even he admits he’s “not happy or satisfied with the speed with which we investigate these cases.” He was referring to news reports that his office takes so long to investigate police shootings that misbehaving officers cannot be disciplined or decertified. We appreciated his forthrightness, but ultimately the buck stops with him.
In 2022, he promised to write fair-minded titles and summaries for state initiatives, but the record shows that he — like many of his predecessors — has struggled to avoid the usual, disreputable gamesmanship with ballot titles and summaries. He argues his office is accurately describing measures, but can anyone really say there’s no gamesmanship in describing Proposition 39’s voter ID proposal as: “Prohibits Citizens From Voting Unless They Present Government-Issued Identification”?
Given the state’s political leanings, we expect Bonta to win rather handily. That may be for the best given the alternative, but we can’t give our imprimatur this time.