California is home to 40 million residents. This enormous population is the partial underlying of a big problem: The state needs water. So much so that Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown has implemented measures to significantly curb water usage. But a large population is only the half of it. Despite periodic droughts and an influx of residents (legal and illegal), California has rejected policies that would alleviate its water needs.

In 2015, historian and California native Victor Davis Hanson noted, “It is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and infrastructure. Sharp rises in population still would not have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers’ advice to continually increase water storage.” Furthermore, he wrote, “They would never have envisioned in a state of 40 million using the reservoirs in a drought to release water year-round for environmental objectives such as aiding the delta smelt or reintroducing salmon in the San Joaquin River watershed.”

Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and California residents are the ones suffering. Thanks to Gov. Brown, “There is a daily per-person 55-gallon limit ratcheting down to 50 gallons over the course of a decade, fines will be imposed upon violation, and, for at least some users, a reasonable-length shower and running the wash will put them over,” Inez Feltscher Stepman reports.

These limitations would have the effect of making showering and doing laundry on the same day unattainable for some people — an observation that elicited false rebuttals from the usual suspects, including from the “fact-checker” website Snopes, which stated: “The laws do not render it illegal for Californians to do laundry and take showers on the same day.” Well, duh. The law doesn’t explicitly prohibit showers and laundry, but in some cases that will be the inevitable outcome.

Snopes is conflating literal vs. figurative language here just like it did when it asserted that a California pro-LGBT assembly bill “does not seek to outlaw all religious or moral instruction regarding sexuality and sexual orientation, nor would it ban the sale or possession of generic religious texts such as the Bible.” Memo to Snopes: Read between the lines. Otherwise, stop pretending to be a fact-checker.

(Edited.)