According to CalMatters Housing, Attorney General Rob Bonta has become known for issuing an extraordinary volume of self-promotional statements and media releases highlighting his office's work. The piece notes that Bonta's office has put out nearly five hundred press releases this year alone, often announcing legal victories and initiatives. However, the reporting raises questions about what happens when Bonta's office actually loses cases in court, since those setbacks rarely get the same media attention or acknowledgment.
The article explains that when Bonta's Department of Justice does lose or settle lawsuits, those losses are typically buried in what's called a claims bill. These are pieces of legislation that appropriate state money to pay damages to the winners of cases the attorney general's office has lost. CalMatters Housing reports that the current claims bill awaiting approval would allocate funding to settle eight cases, with four of them involving lawsuits that successfully challenged California's gun control laws.
According to the reporting, Bonta's office has lost multiple cases related to firearms regulations in recent years. Two cases involved challenges to concealed weapons permit rules, and two involved the state's restrictions on marketing firearms-related products to young people. The winners in the marketing cases argued that California's law violated their free speech rights. These losses come as lawsuits against California's gun control measures have been succeeding more frequently in recent years, relying on U.S. Supreme Court decisions that uphold Second Amendment protections.
The CalMatters piece criticizes the lack of transparency around these legal defeats, noting that voters and taxpayers have to wait for hastily passed claims bills to discover which cases the attorney general has lost and how much they've cost the state. The reporting suggests that California should follow the example of Los Angeles, which maintains a public website documenting lawsuits the city has lost and the amounts paid out since fiscal 2020, totaling over one billion dollars across more than twelve thousand cases.
What I am seeing locally is that transparency in government operations matters to people who are paying attention to where their tax dollars go. When any government agency, whether it's focused on housing, litigation, or regulation, wins cases it broadcasts those victories loudly. The harder part is getting honest information about the losses, and that matters for how we understand the true cost of policy decisions that affect our market.
