Enacted in 2018 over the vigorous objections of Silicon Valley tech giants, California’s first-in-the-nation online privacy law took effect Jan. 1, 2020. But with the staff of state Attorney General Xavier Becerra still far short of finalizing an enforcement framework, it’s unclear what effect the California Consumer Privacy Act will have in the short term.

The law’s most important provisions appear straightforward. Californians can ask companies which collect information online what information they have on them. Companies must delete this information upon request. Websites with third-party trackers must make it easy for consumers to opt out of having their information sold by having a visible button allowing them to quickly do so on their home pages.

But echoing the warnings of the California Chamber of Commerce, there’s confusion on how much information companies can retain on their customers – as opposed to information on those who have visited websites or use phone applications. There are also questions about what constitutes the sort of data that consumers should be able to control.

Facebook, Google have different view of law’s scope

“Companies have different interpretations, and depending on which lawyer they are using, they’re going to get different advice,” privacy software executive Kabir Barday told the New York Times.

This is plain in the contrasting plans of California’s two most high-profile tech firms.

Facebook told advertisers in early December that it had no plans to change data-collection policies because it doesn’t believe that “routine data transfers” about consumers fit the definition of selling data contained in the California law, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Google, however, has put up a website that says the company welcomes the California law and will fully adhere to its intent of letting consumers control their personal data. The company is telling advertisers that consumer data can only be used for fraud detection or to measure online views of ads – and never to try to ascertain the buying habits or product searches of individuals.

Meanwhile, the Experian credit-reporting service told Becerra’s office that it strongly objected to having to provide consumers with “internally generated data” about them, arguing that such information is proprietary and isn’t akin to snooping on individuals’ online search habits and histories.

The Evite company that lets people send out personalized online invitations to parties or events has taken a different tack: using its privacy policy page to make the case to users that the information it collects is used in benign ways that benefit users and improves the services Evite offers.

The law does not apply to businesses with annual revenue of less than $25 million that do not buy or sell personal information on at least 50,000 people a year.

Becerra expects to have guidelines finished by summer

Becerra issued draft guidelines for how the law would be implemented in October. His office is now evaluating the complaints and comments it got from privacy activists, affected companies and others. The goal is to have the regulations in place by the middle of the year.

A key question going forward is how hard Becerra will come down on the 100-plus “data broker” firms in the U.S. which accumulate and sell the most personal of information yet have managed to escape much attention. An investigation posted by the Fast Company media website last March detailed how “if you use a smartphone or a credit card, it’s not difficult for a company to determine if you’ve just gone through a break-up, if you’re pregnant or trying to lose weight, whether you’re an extrovert [and] what medicine you take.” Jewelry sellers, for example, can get customized lists of which consumers have a history of buying expensive gifts on Valentine’s Day.

The firms’ ability to provide such detailed, specific information could be widely curtailed if enough consumers opt out of sharing their personal information – at least if they’re based in California or a state or nation with similar rules. But since such data mining can be done about Americans by companies based in nations with no such rules, it’s certain to continue. A likely future policy fight is over whether California companies should be banned from obtaining such personal information from firms that don’t honor online privacy laws like the Golden State’s.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s recent decision to put a one-year moratorium on insurance companies refusing to renew policies on homes in areas adjacent to recent devastating wildfires has garnered widely mixed reaction.

Lara’s decision ensures roughly 800,000 homeowners can have policies renewed. It’s allowed under Senate Bill 824, which Lara shepherded to passage in 2018 while a state senator representing Bell Gardens. An estimated 350,000 policies had not been renewed in California since the beginning of 2015.

“This wildfire insurance crisis has been years in the making, but it is an emergency we must deal with now if we are going to keep the California dream of homeownership from becoming the California nightmare,” Lara said in a statement.

Lara has won praise from consumer advocates who say insurers are too quick to cancel policies held by homeowners who have dutifully paid premiums for years without ever filing claims. He’s also gotten kudos for his November decision to expand the state-overseen FAIR program, which is run by a pool of insurers and provides bare-bones insurance to homeowners otherwise unable to get policies. Beginning in April, FAIR is supposed to offer plans that cover $3 million in damages, up from the present $1.5 million.

But an analysis by The New York Times suggests that Lara has misjudged the risk that insurers face in an era of hotter, drier weather and that the industry could be on the road to ruin. It noted that the $20 billion that insurers offering policies in the state lost because of devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018 “wiped out a full quarter-century of the industry’s profits” from California operations, according to the Milliman consulting firm.

Lara told the Times that all he was doing was “hitting the pause button on non-renewals” to stabilize the home insurance market and let insurers and regulators catch their breath and carefully evaluate future steps.

Parallels seen to Hurricane Andrew, Northridge earthquake

But Milliman actuary Eric Xu compared the massive losses suffered by insurers since 2017 to the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992, when insurers lost a similar amount and about a dozen went bankrupt.

Karl Susman, owner of a Los Angeles-based insurance agency, told the Associated Press that the present crisis reminded him of the fallout from the Northridge earthquake in 1994, which led many insurers to either stop renewing earthquake insurance policies or to get out of the field entirely. He questioned whether the historic model of home insurance was “sustainable” in California, given fire risks. 

Home insurers in the state requested about 80 rate hikes in 2018, far more than the norm. But the hikes are generally rejected unless it can be established that they are needed because of demonstrated risk – not the higher risks that insurance actuaries expect because of a hotter climate.

“That works, until it doesn’t,” Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, an insurers’ trade association, told the New York Times. He questioned how the industry could survive unless it was allowed to factor in future risks.

Insurers have grumbled but otherwise taken no formal steps to challenge Lara’s moratorium on non-renewals, which is in effect until Dec. 5, 2020. 

But the insurance companies which pool to provide the FAIR “insurance of last resort” program are openly defying Lara. FAIR officials were supposed to provide an operational plan by Dec. 14 of how they would expand the program and increase coverage limits, as the insurance commissioner had ordered. Instead, they sued Lara just before the deadline, saying he had grossly overstepped his authority.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear an appeal of a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruling limiting when homeless people can be arrested in California and eight other Western states has left lawmakers who want a crackdown over the homeless’ negative effects on quality of life not even sure what that might look like.

In 2018, the San Francisco-based appellate court threw out a broadly written Boise, Idaho, law allowing arrests for sleeping in public, holding that if there were no shelter beds available, this was a cruel and unusual punishment. But dozens of local governments submitted or co-signed amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that the decision was murky at best. One oft-cited example: If a city has fewer shelter beds than its homeless population, is the city automatically blocked from arresting those sleeping in public? 

Some Los Angeles officials fear that’s a likely interpretation.

“The [Boise case] language, rather than citing clear principles where constitutional questions are at stake, makes local jurisdictions vulnerable to lawsuits as they struggle to achieve a balance between the legitimate rights and interests of homeless people and the legitimate rights and interests of other residents and businesses,” City Attorney Mike Feuer told The New York Times.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called the ruling “ambiguous and confusing” and said in a statement released by his office that the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal “handicaps cities and counties from acting nimbly to aid those perishing on the streets, exacerbating unsafe and unhealthy conditions that negatively affect our most vulnerable residents.”

Large homeless camps called ‘untenable’

It was Ridley-Thomas in September who signaled the arrival of a backlash on homelessness by breaking dramatically with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has called for a compassion-first approach to what he calls “the moral and humanitarian crisis of our time.”

After persuading L.A. County supervisors to vote 3-2 to support filing an amicus brief backing Boise’s appeal, Ridley-Thomas issued a statement saying the status quo in which the city and county accept massive homeless encampments is “untenable. … We need to call this what it is — a state of emergency — and refuse to resign ourselves to a reality where people are allowed to live in places not fit for human habitation.”

Until then, Ridley-Thomas had been seen as a supporter of the view touted by Democrats like Garcetti and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who argue that homelessness can be sharply reduced with the patient, smart use of public resources. Earlier this year, Newsom had named Ridley-Thomas to be part of his state commission on homelessness.

The fear that the Boise ruling would destroy the quality of life in cities with substantial homeless populations was a focus of Boise’s appeal, which was prepared by the Los Angeles-based Gibson Dunn law firm. “Nothing in the Constitution … requires cities to surrender their streets, sidewalks, parks, riverbeds and other public areas to vast encampments,” the appeal asserted.

San Francisco official downplays impact of ruling

While they were outnumbered by lawmakers who feared the worst, some local officials in San Francisco and Oakland were less alarmed with the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to pass on the Boise case.

In interpreting the appellate court’s 2018 ruling, these officials concluded they had the open-ended right to clear encampments that posed clear health and safety risks — so long as they notified those in encampments ahead of time that the camps are going to be cleared and offered the homeless storage for their belongings.

Jeff Kositsky, chief of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he considered the Supreme Court’s action to be a “nonissue.”

Seventy-five miles to the east, Sacramento officials were far more concerned. They fear the upholding of the Boise ruling will interfere with local governments’ efforts to remove the homeless camps that have frequently sprung up in flood-prone areas, especially by the American River in Sacramento.

The June 30, 2020, deadline for Pacific Gas & Electric to emerge from bankruptcy if the giant utility wants to be eligible for a $21 billion wildfire relief fund set up by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature earlier this year may end up an unofficial deadline of another sort: for the parties interested in taking over all or part of PG&E to put forward their best plans to win over Newsom, the Legislature, Wall Street and the public.

That’s because Newsom’s announcement of his opposition to PG&E’s plan to come out of bankruptcy contains such fundamental objections that it is hard to see a possible compromise. While the governor cannot single-handedly prevent the plan from being approved by regulators and a U.S. bankruptcy judge, his opinion is sure to carry weight. Without his support, PG&E’s path out of bankruptcy is sharply complicated.

Newsom described PG&E’s proposal as being “woefully short” of the commitments needs to ensure the scandal-plagued utility is able “to provide safe, reliable and affordable service to its customers.” His critique included what seemed akin to one of the “poison pills” that the corporate world uses to make sure deals are rejected: a demand that the utility replace every member of its board of directors.

The governor’s position appears encouraging to the coalition of Northern California cities that announced in early November that they were working together to craft a plan take over PG&E operations. Those cities: San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento, Hayward, Sunnyvale, Richmond, Redwood City, Petaluma, Sonoma, Windsor, Cotati, Elk Grove, Clovis, Chico, Redding, Davis, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley and San Luis Obispo. Supervisors from San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Marin, Yolo and San Benito counties also endorsed the effort. The coalition includes local governments with about one-third of PG&E’s 16 million customers in the utility’s 70,000-square-mile service area.

Cities push for power provider run like credit union

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo – de facto leader of the coalition – told the San Francisco Chronicle that he envisioned a electricity supplier run more like a nonprofit credit union than a government-run utility. Backers cited the Georgia Electric Membership Corp., a 501(c)(6) nonprofit that distributes energy from three power providers to 41 not-for-profit local utilities with a total of 4.4 million customers.

But another approach has the strong backing of one of the richest cities in America: San Francisco. Mayor London Breed has long been on record as saying local power infrastructure should be under local control and in September joined with City Attorney Dennis Herrera to offer PG&E $2.5 billion to buy local power lines. 

The measure was quickly rejected by PG&E and appears to have little support beyond city limits. In October, the editorial page of the San Francisco Chronicle called the plan unlikely to be approved by state regulators for a basic reason: Utilities use big-city profits to keep power affordable in rural communities, and any break-up of PG&E means “the state would almost certainly have to help provide power to rural areas — likely at taxpayer expense.”

Newsom has not explained his view of what a PG&E takeover might look like, but he appears to agree with the Chronicle about the need to keep intact the basic framework of a large utility. 

Gov. Newsom wants Warren Buffett to buy utility

In October, he made headlines when he said he hoped that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding group considered buying the utility.

“We would love to see that interest materialize, in a more proactive, public effort,” Newsom told Bloomberg News.

While Buffett has shown no public interest in the idea of acquiring a controlling interest in California’s largest power utility, several hedge funds have been plain with their interest in taking over PG&E for nearly a year. They have drawn little support from lawmakers because of the perception they would be as indifferent to safety as the owners they hope to replace.

PG&E entered into bankruptcy in January, citing potential liabilities of $30 billion because of massive recent wildfires in recent years that have often been blamed on the utility’s poorly maintained infrastructure. 

The utility believed it had crossed a huge hurdle to emerging from bankruptcy on Dec. 6 when it announced a $13.5 billion settlement of damage claims from four of the largest blazes, sending its stock price higher. Seven days later, Newsom announced his opposition to the utility’s overall plan to emerge from bankruptcy, sending the stock price down to near 52-week lows.

Allegations that Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith and some of her top brass traded concealed weapons permits to a private company protecting top Facebook officials in return for a large campaign donation have dogged Smith since July and August, when the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office began serving search warrants on homes of top department officials and searched the sheriff’s headquarters.

The primary focus of DA investigators – at least publicly – has been a $45,000 donation from Martin Nielsen, the leader of the AS Solution private protection firm, to the Santa Clara County Public Safety Alliance, a political action committee that backed Sheriff Smith in the 2018 election cycle and helped her win a sixth term. AS Solution operatives subsequently got several permits.

In September, San Jose Inside – the online website that broke the story of the probe in August – and other outlets reported that in 2018, there had been a deposit of $70,000 into Nielsen’s Citibank account just before he made the donation to the pro-Smith PAC. That raises the prospect of someone or some organization trying to launder campaign contributions, which is a violation of state law. San Jose Inside also reported last month that Santa Clara County Undersheriff Rick Sung had his home raided and some electronics confiscated by the DA’s office.

Report faults lack of standards on permits

Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury-News reported last week that four Apple security executives had obtained concealed weapon permits. Last month, the newspaper reported that a review of permit records it obtained from the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Department showed apparent favoritism toward well-connected applicants and a lack of guidelines on when the permits should be issued. The report quoted a law enforcement official as saying permit decisions were based solely on the views of Smith – the first woman county sheriff in California history – and her top aides. 

But as a 2017 report by state Auditor Elaine Howle suggested, controversies like the current one in Santa Clara are close to inevitable because a century-old state law gives extraordinary discretion to county sheriffs and police chiefs in deciding which civilians get to carry a gun as they got about their lives.

The law says those applying for permits must demonstrate a “good cause” for a concealed weapon, must have “good moral character” and must complete a weapons-safety training course.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, this flexibility has led to the issuing of zero concealed weapons permits in San Francisco, with a population of nearly 900,000, and to 2,300 winning approval in Solano County, with half the number of residents.

The state auditor wrote in 2017 that there was nothing inherently wrong with local governments having different standards and that she found no evidence of wrongdoing in the awarding of permits in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego counties, which were the focus of her review.

CCW records often kept private for a year or more

But that hasn’t stopped years of headlines and letters to the editor questioning sheriffs and police chiefs for their decisions on permits and their lack of transparency on the topic. Many agencies take a year or more in responding to requests for related public documents.

Meanwhile, prosecutors face roadblocks in proving that campaign donations are the equivalent of bribes, especially in cases that are years old. The case of former Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona illustrates this. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that Carona – first elected in 1998 – had issued 86 badges to his early political supporters that allowed them to carry concealed weapons. In 2007, former Assistant Sheriff John Haidl testified in Carona’s criminal trial that the badge program was explicitly created to boost Carona’s political war chest. The case presented by prosecutors included recordings of three conversations between Carona and Haidl in which Haidl wore a wire. The men talked about how to coordinate their stories to obstruct the federal probe of the badge program. 

But in 2009, a jury found Carona guilty of only one felony count of witness tampering. Carona’s lawyers targeted the credibility of Haidl – a Newport Beach businessman with no law enforcement experience – and argued that the statute of limitations had expired on most of the charges against the former sheriff.

Carona was sentenced to five and a half years in a federal prison.

One of Gavin Newsom’s first acts after taking office as governor in January was to create a “DMV Reinvention Strike Team” to improve the performance of the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

This came after one of the worst years a state agency has had in recent history. In August 2018, CalWatchdog and many other news outlets reported that wait times were nearly 50 percent longer at DMV offices than the previous summer. The problem was blamed on a heavy increase in visits caused by the federal 2005 Real ID Act. It requires Californians to have either passports or new federal ID cards before they can take commercial flights starting in October 2020. The DMV is the agency that issues the Real IDs.

A month later, another scandal emerged, with thousands of thousands of voters reporting errors in their political party affiliation due to mistakes made in the DMV’s new “motor voter” automatic registration program, which began in April 2018. An audit released in August of this year found the problem was far worse than initially believed, with more than a quarter-million errors in registration in the first five months of the program – 83,684 duplicate voter registrations and 171,145 DMV records with inconsistencies on party membership.

Newsom’s “strike team” issued its report in July on what it had done to fix the agency and said internal data showed a reduction in wait teams of 58 minutes over the previous summer. Two weeks ago, the DMV issued a statement saying that wait times had continued to decline and averaged 38 minutes in September. 

But now the DMV’s other 2018 problem has re-emerged with reports in Northern California of pervasive errors in motor voter registrations, prompting Republican lawmakers to renew their call to put the program on hold until its flaws are comprehensively fixed.

At least 600 complaints so far; number could soar

“At least 600 Californians, including lifelong Republicans and Democrats, have had their voter registration unexpectedly changed, and several county elections officials are pinning much of the blame on the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles,” the Sacramento Bee reported. The daughter of California Senate Republican Leader Shannon Grove of Bakersfield, who had recently used a Sacramento County DMV office, was among those affected. Grove is a leading critic of motor voter.

Sacramento CBS 13’s news team reported at least 300 apparent complaints in Santa Clara County, nearly 200 in Sacramento County and at least 100 in Shasta County.

Reports noted that it’s possible that some of the mistakes were made by voters themselves not used to election services at DMV and that some voters may have misremembered what party status they had chosen previously. But as CBS 13 reported, problems appeared to be turning up in every county as soon as registrars began sending out voter notifications related to the March primary. With El Dorado County sending out notifications last Friday and dozens of counties doing so in coming weeks, the dimensions of the problem could be far bigger than initially assumed – just like last year.

Oregon, which introduced its version of motor voter in January 2016, has had far fewer problems.

Californians can check how they are presently registered at https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/ and they can change their status if needed at https://registertovote.ca.gov/.

A survey of 2,800 U.S. colleges prepared by the Institute of International Education and the U.S. State Department underscores once again how much the budget of the University of California relies on high tuition and fees paid by foreign students.

The survey showed California had far and away the most international students with 161,693. Some 42 percent of the students are from China and 13 percent are from India. Five UC campuses had at least 8,000 international students: UCLA (11,942), UC San Diego (10,652), UC Berkeley (10,063), UC Irvine (8,064) and UC Davis (8,048).

The numbers illustrate that for all the criticism leveled at UC President Janet Napolitano in a 2016 report by state Auditor Elaine Howle, the UC system’s most important fiscal strategy relies on attracting foreign students. They pay about $44,000 annually, triple what in-state students pay.

The audit showed that in 2008 – at the beginning of the Great Recession – about 5 percent of students in the UC system were international students or from other U.S. states. By 2016, the number was 15.3 percent. The large increase was linked by UC leaders to the sharp long-term decline in state financial support. Critics, however, said UC had refused to do any of the belt-tightening done in the rest of the state government in response to a 20 percent decline in state revenue a decade ago.

Howle’s most explosive allegation was that standards had been lowered so much for non-California applicants that qualified in-state students couldn’t get into to any UC. 

Napolitano rejected nearly all of Howle’s allegations but didn’t challenge her point that a huge change in UC admissions policies had been made with scant explanation to the public or to then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature. Under heavy pressure, she agreed to major increases in California student admissions – but not to stop relying on foreign students as cash cows. The main concession on that front from UC regents who strongly backed Napolitano: a 2017 decision to have a maximum of 18 percent of non-California students in the UC system. This has had little if any effect on how many are admitted because UC now enrolls far more total students – about 280,000 – then it did four years ago (248,000).

Californians enrolled in UC system set record this year

In June, UC announced that new records had been set in the number of Californians admitted as freshmen (71,655) and transfer students (28,752) at the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

Meanwhile, it appears that tension related to the U.S.-China trade war has ended the years of annual increases in Chinese students at UC. According to recent reports, their enrollment is flat or slightly down at several campuses. UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla lamented the development in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last month – not on fiscal grounds but because of the quality of the students, especially those in science majors.

But another factor besides tension between Washington and Beijing could be that colleges across the United States have reached the same conclusion that UC leaders did in 2008 and are now going after the same pool of high-paying international students as UC.

In August, USA Today reported that its analysis of federal data showed that “more than 240 public universities across the country admitted fewer in-state students in 2017 than they did five years earlier, and for 46 of those, the share of in-state students is down by at least 10 percent.”

California agencies are trying to figure out the implications of a vague executive order issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September that orders many policy decisions to be made with the need to “mitigate climate change” kept in mind.

A recent Sacramento Bee story suggested that among the most vexed were the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the two pension giants with estimated unfunded liabilities of $136 billion and $107 billion, respectively, according to 2018 data.

The Bee reported that while the Newsom administration wasn’t ordering CalPERS and CalSTRS to divest from firms involved in fossil fuel, it was requiring them to make new investment decisions that reflect “the increased risks to the economy and physical environment due to climate change.”

Newsom thinks fossil fuel companies are in trouble

This reflects the assumption of the Newsom administration that there will be a rapid shift away from fossil fuels – a view that many hedge funds, mutual funds and large institutional investors don’t share. Large energy corporations remain popular with their stock pickers despite global warming fears. And contrary to the idea that these companies are in decline, some investors see fracking continuing to increase oil production in the U.S. for years to come. Last week, for example, the Motley Fool investment website strongly recommended buying ExxonMobil in 2020, noting that its annual divided “has increased more than 100 percent over the past 10 years.”

Newsom’s edict is producing heartburn with some members of the CalPERS board. That’s because, as the Bee noted, “pension systems have a financial obligation to earn as much as cash as possible to provide retirement security for millions of government employees.”

Former Garden Grove Unified manager Margaret Brown, a CalSTRS critic who won election to the board in December 2017, wrote on Twitter that “unless the governor is willing to take even more $$$ from over-taxed California citizens, Newsom should step back.” 

Corona police Sgt. Jason Perez upset CalPERS Board President Priva Mathur in the October 2018 election after running a campaign that blasted Mathur and other trustees for not focusing solely on returns in their investment decisions.

But the CalPERS and CalSTRS boards have a history of using investments for decades to make political statements. In September, state Treasurer Fiona Ma – who sits on both boards – strongly endorsed such investment activism.

CalPERS quietly shifting from low-risk ‘passive investing’

That means CalPERS and CalSTRS executives are under heavy pressure to improve returns while making investments that can be defended as socially responsible.

The Naked Capitalism website reported in October that this pressure may have led to CalPERS making a major shift in investing part of its portfolio. Instead of traditional “passive equity investing” in index funds that track the S&P 500 or other large categories of stocks and emphasize diversified portfolios, CalPERS has begun to adopt a more aggressive “factor investing” approach that has a chance of generating bigger returns by focusing on industries with better prospects for short- and medium-term gains, among its many tenets. The approach is also somewhat riskier than using index funds.

Reporter Yves Smith wrote that this was a major shift in investment strategy on a par with “CalPERS’ renouncement of hedge funds” in 2014.

The website, which is run by veterans of the global financial industry, has broken a series of stories about CalPERS in recent years.

In August 2018, it revealed that CalPERS CEO Marcia Frost had misrepresented her academic background and didn’t have a college degree.

This August, it offered evidence that CalPERS was hiding a negative audit of its hiring practices that had been triggered in part by the agency’s failure to vet Frost’s claims.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democratic lawmakers have expressed no contrition for their failed attempt to force President Donald Trump to release five years of tax returns to gain access to the California ballot in the 2020 general election.

The California Supreme Court recently ruled unanimously that Senate Bill 27, signed by Newsom in July, violated the state Constitution. The opinion by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye at times had an incredulous tone, noting that advocates appeared unaware of SB27’s obvious conflict with Proposition 4. That’s a 1972 amendment to the California Constitution easily passed by state voters that requires presidential primaries must be open to all “recognized” candidates.

Further reflecting the state high court’s view that the law was frivolous, the unanimous verdict was delivered just 15 days after justices heard testimony in the case. Court watchers said that was highly unusual.

A federal judge had already ruled the law violated the U.S. Constitution in September. That decision was appealed by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, but the appeal was dropped after the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

Nevertheless, a spokesman for Newsom continued to depict the now-void law as well-intentioned.

Jesse Melgar told the San Francisco Chronicle that the governor “would continue to urge all candidates to voluntarily release their tax returns. … Congress and other states can and should take action to require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns.”

Padilla issued a statement expressing disappointment with the state high court’s decision but also declaring “the movement for greater transparency will endure. The history of our democracy is on the side of more transparency, not less.”

‘Ridiculous’ bill said to reflect ‘arrogance and hypocrisy’

Defenses of the law were scoffed at by opinion writers.

The Sacramento Bee editorial board – which had ripped SB27 as “silly and destructive” when Newsom signed it into law – wrote that the measure  “was so ridiculous and flawed that even California’s justices could barely conceal their disdain.” 

The Southern California Newspaper Group’s editorial noted that the state high court “quoted former Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto of a similar bill in 2017: ‘Today we require tax returns, but what would be next? Five years of health records? A certified birth certificate? High school report cards?’

“Democratic lawmakers and a new governor refused to learn from that message. They tried again and embarrassed themselves. They richly deserved the court’s smackdown.”

The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that the tax-returns law “accomplished only one thing: giving Trump more ammunition against the state he loves to mock.”

Times columnist George Skelton was the harshest critic of all, noting that many of the Democrats who claimed the moral high ground in backing the tax-returns requirement were not transparent about their own finances.

“This is not about whether Trump should release his federal tax returns,” he wrote. “Rather, it’s about Democrats enacting a blatantly unconstitutional law with a straight face for purely political reasons. It’s about arrogance and hypocrisy.”

Part of SB27 that was reportedly included at Newsom’s behest remains intact. It’s the requirement that gubernatorial candidates provide five years of tax returns to qualify for the ballot beginning with the 2022 election.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. It passed in Senate on a 29-10 vote and in the Assembly on a 57-17 vote in early July.

Leaders of the University of California system appear strongly inclined to drop the requirement that applicants to UC campuses take the SAT or ACT test, heeding the argument that it hurts the chances of Latino and African-American students to be admitted.

A faculty task force is expected to deliver a report on whether the mandate should be retained in February. But UC Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who is also the chancellor of the California Community College system, has already called for scrapping the standardized test requirement. So has UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and Michael Brown, the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs for the UC system and its 10 campuses. No one who works for UC appears to be standing up, at least publicly, for the testing mandate.

The SAT/ACT test has for decades been criticized for alleged cultural bias against minorities. But that claim is strongly disputed by the College Board, which administers the test and says it has long since fine-tuned the language of questions in the test so that they don’t presume knowledge of white cultural norms. Some academic studies back up this claim of neutrality and find that SATs are a better indicator of college success than grades.

But one of the SAT critiques offered by Ortiz, the regent, is mostly undisputed. It’s that low-income Latino and African-American families are unable to pay for the vast variety of test-preparation classes used by middle-income and wealthy families to help their children. “Perhaps the tests were well-intended, but they are perpetuating a wealth advantage and undervaluing low-income students,” he wrote earlier this year.

The Princeton Review test-prep company, for example, “guarantees” that its 30-hour, $1,599 class will lead to at least a 1400 score on the basic SAT. A 1400 is at the 95th percentile of the approximately 2 million SATs taken each year.

Meanwhile, upper-income families have long been willing to spend whatever it takes to help their children on standardized tests, in particular by hiring specialized English and math tutors who charge up to $450 an hour.

But the College Board pushes back on this front as well, saying it provides free test prep online that helps tens of thousands of students each year.

Nonprofit behind SAT defends UC admission practices

The New Jersey-based nonprofit is so worried that a UC decision to drop the SAT would be copied by many other U.S. universities – as a recent USA Today analysis predicts – that it is offering increasingly thorough defenses of how UC makes its admission decisions.

According to an EdSource report, Jessica Howell, vice president of research at the College Board, appeared at a symposium on the SAT two weeks ago in Berkeley in which she suggested that critics of the test exaggerated its importance to UC admission officers, who consider 14 factors in evaluating prospective students.

“Any effective standardized measure that is one of those factors is going to reveal underlying inequities in our society,” she said. “As researchers, we shouldn’t stop using them, or measuring them because we don’t like what they say. … [Instead,] we should continue to have a discussion about solutions to close the gaps that we see.”

The comment reflects the College Board’s argument that if SAT critics think it’s unfair that students from wealthy families with more resources do better than students from poor families, it’s not the test that’s unfair. It’s American life – the rich can help their kids more than other families.

To address this issue, the College Board proposed also giving SAT test takers an “adversity score” in May so colleges could quickly determine if a student came from difficult circumstances. But the plan was dropped in August after if faced harsh criticism that it was a facile attempt to label students from wildly different backgrounds with a simple number.