If you recently filled your car with gas, fixed your air conditioner, or stocked your pantry, then you know that the price of countless aspects of everyday life has gone up. You have probably also noticed that things you used to be able to find on store shelves aren’t available anymore.

Unfortunately, this is the future liberals seem to want. They are pushing to reshape the consumer world through various channels (federal regulations, tax credits, outright product bans, etc.). But one of the tools they have been using, and which deserves more attention, is a wave of public nuisance lawsuits against the makers of all sorts of everyday products upon which consumers depend.

Just this month, California jumped into the public nuisance fray, filing a lawsuit claiming oil companies Exxon, Shell, BP, and others misled the public and seeking the “creation of a special fund to pay for recovery.”

And it is not just California. Trial lawyers and liberal politicians have been coordinating to exploit “public nuisance” lawsuits to score wins that they cannot land in state Houses, in Washington, D.C., or at ballot boxes across the country. Local governments in New York, for example, have filed suits against firearm manufacturers. Other states and cities have sued chemical manufacturers over everyday materials used in making and packaging countless household and personal hygiene products. A number of cities have sued carmakers for cars being stolen and beverage companies over plastic bottles and litter. And several school districts have sued app makers over the youth mental health crisis.

These efforts are bad for everyday consumers but good for trial lawyers and the left-wing political establishment. Indeed, a new report by the group that I run, Alliance for Consumers, explains how these lawsuits subvert the U.S. legal system, circumvent the legislative process, and seek to impose extreme policies while funneling big payouts into left-wing political campaigns to fuel the process all over again.

It all starts with contorting the law. Under traditional common law, public nuisance involves something that is pretty clearly unlawful and which affects surrounding neighbors’ property, such as running a brothel or drug house in a residential neighborhood, blocking a public right of way, or operating a factory that emits noxious smells. And the target of the lawsuits is the agent directly responsible for causing the alleged harm.

Real-life examples of these types of lawsuits exist. Just consider the lawsuit a California city filed against a Sriracha factory over the effect the plant had on neighbors, or a recent lawsuit by Phoenix business owners over the city’s promotion of a homeless encampment on the front steps of their sandwich shops.

But in recent years, trial lawyers have twisted and reshaped the legal theory such that almost anything can be deemed a public nuisance. Can’t ban plastic bottles where you live? Don’t worry, just declare them a nuisance and lob a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. Can’t pass a particular climate change bill in Congress or in your state House? Don’t worry, just declare various actors in the oil and gas industry to be facilitating a public nuisance and demand billions for the projects you wanted to fund in the first place.

And along the way, send a big check to a law firm that likely kicks proceeds back to various left-wing politicians via campaign contributions.

Wherever you stand on the underlying policy debates, it is easy to see that allowing the Left to circumvent the democratic process and reshape our economy in the courts is a poor plan — not least because it leads to bad outcomes for everyday consumers, who end up bearing the brunt of this campaign. Indeed, these “public nuisance” lawsuits imperil products that consumers rely on, from the gas they put in their cars and the straws they put in their drinks to the household appliances they use for cooking and cleaning.

It is high time that these deals stop. A cabal of law firms and politicians is running rampant, trying to line their pockets while removing products from store shelves or bankrupting companies that sit on the wrong side of imagined ideological fault lines.

Consumers, who don’t live every day focused on ideological battlefields, deserve better.

California and its friends must stop trying to make everyone’s lives worse through the courtroom and start putting everyday consumers first for a change.

O.H. Skinner is the executive director of Alliance for Consumers, an organization dedicated to protecting consumer interests from trial lawyers and politicians, and the former solicitor general of Arizona.