Last month, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that California’s ill-fated high-speed rail project would be scaled back enormously due to cost overruns and delays. The original project, which had an initial cost estimate of $33 billion, would have provided high-speed train service (speeds on some segments in excess of 200 miles per hour) beginning in San Diego, traveling through Los Angeles and the Central Valley up to the state capital of Sacramento, and would have also included the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. With possible federal contributions, this idea sounded promising enough that nearly 53 percent of California taxpayers voted for a $9 billion bond in 2008 to help finance it.

“Since its inception 170 years ago, California constitutional law has dictated that a governor must be inside state lines to exercise the powers of the office...In an alternative universe in which the lieutenant governor was a Republican, this would present a headache for California’s state government." - Bill Whalen

While the big California news this past weekend was the 91st annual Academy Awards, a different kind of history occurred in the northern part of America’s nation-state.

When senior Alexis Allen was growing up in Chula Vista, California, border security was something that was frequently on her mind. At her school, just north of the San Ysidro border in San Diego county, 75 to 80 percent of students were Hispanic, she said – and 15 to 20 percent lived in Tijuana, Mexico, crossing the border each day to attend her high school.