Yes.
And, here's the problem with this guy's theory. Suppose that California's governing politicians wanted to stifle conservative activists and passed a statute making it a felony for demonstrators to carry signs that espouse conservative opinions. Some conservative activist would file a lawsuit in a federal court arguing that the statute is obviously unconstitutional. And, the federal judge would agree and declare the law unconstitutional.
Now, if this author is correct, then the State of California could just decide not to appeal. Since the district court was not an appellate court, the State of California could just go on enforcing its unconstitutional statute.
But, of course, this author's theory is not correct. The State of California is bound by the decision of the U.S. District Court even though it is not an appellate court. The State of California doesn't have the power to decide which federal courts it will obey.
Well, yes, actually it does, and constantly does. There are quite a huge number of district court decisions that the state has ignored over the years, and likely will be another one next week. States ignore federal district courts all the time. Sometimes, a judge will get annoyed about this and will start applying contempt penalties against a state officer until someone gets around to appealing the decision that they decide not to follow.
Rarely does a state bow immediately to a district court.
Of course, in this case, the state was more than ready to bow to the district court, and accepted the decision as final, with no desire to appeal. The question is: can the people force the appeal? The supreme court effectively said no; you want to force an appeal, do it like anyone else does, harass state officials until they get off their rump and appeal it.
Now, as is typical, when Republicans were running for state offices, they ignored the issue, after all, it might offend some gay voters (who for the most part won't be voting Republican anyway...) Rather than make a call to arms to California's voters, they instead chose to ignore it and promote Meg ****man, who was of course whitless.
She took the Karl Rove approved tactic of appealing to and pandering to illegals to gain the governor's chair, while effectively all the major media ignored Jerry Brown.
Not so shockingly, she lost. Because you can't outliberal a liberal.