[MSN/WSJ] California lawmakers on Monday night rolled back one of the most stringent environmental laws in the country, after Gov. Gavin Newsom muscled through the effort in a dramatic move to combat the state’s affordability crisis.A cornerstone of the legislation reins in the California Environmental Quality Act, which for more than a half-century has been used by opponents to block almost any kind of development project. The abuses of the law have spread so widely that opponents used it to block some bicycle-lane expansions when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor, he said during a signing ceremony at the Sacramento capital.
"We have seen this abuse over and over and over again," the governor said. "We have fallen prey to a strategy of delay. As a result of that, we have too much demand chasing too little supply. This is not complicated, it is Econ 101."
Some environmentalists and other defenders of the longstanding law were furious, and warned that developers will now go unchecked. "Who needs Trump when we have a wolf in sheep clothing negotiating backroom deals while he and his oligarch donors score big," one critic wrote on X.