Continuing a longstanding bipartisan tradition, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra came

Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, is sponsoring a measure to repeal the fuel tax and vehicle fee hikes approved this spring. The description given to Allen’s proposal by Becerra’s office didn’t mention taxes or fees. Instead, it said the measure “eliminates recently enacted road repair and transportation funding by repealing revenues dedicated for those purposes.”

Allen’s lawyers said the description was fundamentally deceptive. Last week, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley agreed: “The Attorney General’s title and summary … must be changed to avoid misleading the voters and creating prejudice against the measure,” he wrote.

The revision Frawley ordered: “Repeals recently enacted gas and diesel taxes and vehicle registration fees. Eliminates road repair and transportation programs funded by these taxes and fees.”

The perception of attorneys general using ballot language to manipulate voters has been common for decades.

When Becerra’s predecessor, fellow Democrat Kamala Harris, was attorney general before her election in November to the U.S. Senate, Republicans alleged she was particularly ready to put her thumb on the scale. The ballot description for 2016’s successful Proposition 58 made it seem as if it reinforced English-learning standards in state public schools when its primary intent was to repeal mandatory English-only immersion programs required by 1998’s Proposition 227. In 2015, Harris was trashed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board for effectively killing pension reform measures with what the board called ballot descriptions that sounded like “union talking points.”

When Gov. Jerry Brown was attorney general before Harris, his office also courted controversy. Two of his ballot descriptions were castigated by state judges in the same week in August 2010.

One was for Proposition 23, an unsuccessful measure which would have suspended implementation of state climate-change pollution rules. The initial ballot language was condemned as prejudicial and misleading by Frawley, the same judge who recently ruled against Becerra.

Two days after Frawley’s ruling, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette rejected ballot language for Proposition 25. The successful ballot measure’s key change was to allow the state Legislature to approve a state budget on a simple majority vote. The ballot language Brown approved made it appear as if the measure’s main intent was to reinforce the requirement that the Legislature could only approve tax increases on a two-thirds vote of both the Assembly and the Senate.

Republican attorneys general also accused of voter manipulation

But in the 20th century, when it wasn’t unusual to have Republicans holding statewide office in California, GOP attorneys general drew fire as well for their perceived ballot language machinations.

The most famous example was in 1978, when California voters approved Proposition 13 to put sharp limits on how much property taxes could increase annually. Neither the ballot title or summary approved by GOP Attorney General Evelle Younger mentioned that it also would raise the threshold for raising taxes in the Legislature to a two-thirds vote.

In 1996, Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren also drew fire over the ballot language he approved for Proposition 209, a successful measure limiting the use of racial preferences by state government. In 2012, Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz revisited criticism first made in 1996, arguing that Lungren used “loaded words” to sell opposition to affirmative action.

“When Luis Alejo applied to college at the University of California, Berkeley, admissions counselors could consider his race; when he applied to law school, it had become invisible.

“It was only after a string of rejections led him to beg for a face-to-face interview with an admissions officer, Alejo said, that he won a spot at the University of California, Davis, law school, launching a career that in 2010 elevated him to the state Assembly.

“The year Alejo was preparing for law school, voters altered his prospects by passing Proposition 209, California’s ban on race-inclusive admissions policies. Alejo and others unsuccessfully fought the initiative, a losing battle that he described as a formative political experience.

“’All our fears came true,’ said Alejo, a Democrat from Watsonville. ‘Once it went into effect, we saw dramatic drops in the numbers of students of color being able to attend some of our most prestigious graduate and professional schools.’”

But of course there haven’t been overall “dramatic drops” of “students of color” if you include Asian-Americans. They are the largest ethnic group at UC campuses — 35 percent at UC Berkeley and 33 percent at UCLA.

This is delicious and obnoxious at the same time.

What makes it delicious is that Alejo’s omission of Asian-Americans from “students of color” status so undercuts majority Democrats’ attempts to stop the Latino-Asian rift from growing.

What makes it obnoxious is that Alejo acts as if he holds the moral high ground in advocating for a return to UC admissions policies that punished Asian-American students with de facto quotas — in the name of atoning for white racism.

Racial justice? Social justice?

Joke justice.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/04/25/6355330/split-by-affirmative-action-bill.html#mi_rss=Latest%20News#storylink=cpy

These didn’t pull any punches, echoing what they were hearing from their constituents: Asian parents didn’t want racial quotas keeping their deserving kids out of the UC and CSU campuses of their choice. Their framing: What you define as “social justice” is punishing Asians in the name of atoning for historical white racism.

But will this sharp single-issue split lead to an Asian political realignment? Or just to a shakier Democratic coalition in which Asian-Americans are still largely reliable members?

The latter is far more likely because of how damaged the GOP brand is with Asian-Americans. A new Politico analysis written by three academics opens with the painful account of Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts’ awkward, patronizing and goofy comments to an Indian-American doctor nominated by President Obama to be surgeon general, then says the following:

“… this is exactly the sort of exchange that makes Asian Americans — the fastest growing ethnic group in the country — more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans, and by stunning margins. In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won 73 percent of the Asian American vote, exceeding his support among Hispanics (71 percent) and women (55 percent).”

If GOP can’t understand problem, that’s telling

Politico points out something that I find amazing: Republicans …

“… seem generally mystified as to what they might be doing wrong. …  Asian Americans as a group have certain characteristics that would ordinarily predict a Republican political affiliation, most strikingly their level of income, which on average, is higher than any other ethnic group in the United States. …

“Other conservatives have pointed to less tangible characteristics of Asian Americans, such as an emphasis on discipline in child rearing and a penchant for entrepreneurship, that ought to make them Republicans. ‘If you are looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define “natural”,’” notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray. “And yet something has happened to define conservatism in the minds of Asians as deeply unattractive.”

Yes, “something has happened,” but it’s hardly a mystery. Republicans are perceived as looking down on nonwhites. GOPers may say it’s unfair, but nothing else explains their huge underperformance with Asian voters. The academics agree, and offer some hard evidence, not just anecdotes.

“First, there’s race. The feeling of social exclusion stemming from their ethnic background might push Asian Americans away from the Republican Party. Many studies, like Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s work on the psychology of intergroup relations, have shown that one’s identification with a broad category of people—be it on the basis of language, ethnic or racial solidarity or some other trait—is important politically. Republican rhetoric implying that the (non-white) ‘takers’ are plundering the (white) ‘makers’ has cultivated a perception that the Republican Party is less welcoming of minorities. …

“And many Asian-Americans do feel like they don’t get equal treatment. According to the 2008 National Asian American Survey, nearly 40 percent of Asian Americans suffered one of the following forms of racial discrimination in their lifetime: being unfairly denied a job or fired; unfairly denied a promotion at work; unfairly treated by the police; unfairly prevented from renting or buying a home; treated unfairly at a restaurant or other place of service; or been a victim of a hate crime. We found that self-reported racial discrimination was positively correlated with identification with the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.”

Making the case for Kashkari: 2 plus 2 is 4

Now if this doesn’t make it obvious to California Republicans that letting Neel Kashkari be their gubernatorial candidate for the inevitable November GOP loss to Jerry Brown, nothing will. I wish he didn’t vote for Obama in 2008 and I wish he didn’t see his role as “bailout czar” in the big-government TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) as such a badge of honor.

But if you want Asian-Americans in California to take a fresh look at the GOP — and if you’re a Republican, you do, you do, you do — then the political math is about as difficult as two plus two equals four.

Strategery: Sometimes you just have to go there.

Surveys and anecdotal evidence show that Asian-Americans are generally more entrepreneurial and more suspicious of government, which should incline them to the GOP. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Now, however, we’re seeing just the sort of fracture we would expect if Asian-Americans acted in the traditional, what’s-in-it-for-me? way of interest groups. They’ve figured out that affirmative action in college admissions punishes Asians in the name of atoning for the history of white racism. Check out the lead paragraph of this Pasadena Star-News story — the Vietnamese-American reporter isn’t buying the “racial justice” sales pitch at all:

“SAN GABRIEL — Asians in the San Gabriel Valley and beyond joined forces Friday to rally against a proposed Senate constitutional amendment that they said would punish their children for working hard to achieve the American Dream.

“Olivia Liao, president of the Joint Chinese University Alumni Association, said Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5 is racist because it allows public education institutions to give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

“'(Legislators) feel like the Chinese-American community isn’t paying attention to politics,’ Liao said. ‘We are concerned citizens. We need to stand up when things are not right; we need to be heard. We shouldn’t have any (exceptions) related to race. After all, America is a free country.’

 “State Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, is sponsoring SCA 5, an amendment that would repeal portions of Proposition 209, which prohibited discrimination against people based on their unchangeable identities. If passed, the amendment would allow public education institutions to give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.”

Affirmative action = racial preferences

Wow. That’s as free of lefty spin as any news account I have ever seen of how California’s college admissions practices worked before Prop 209’s passage in 1996.

To paraphrase and condense what I wrote back in 2012, what the media almost never point out is that the UC admissions status quo before 1996 indisputably punished a minority. This is from the March 31, 1996, N.Y. Times story about UC’s adoption of a plan that even before Prop. 209 was passed would have phased out the use of race as a factor in deciding college admissions by spring 1998:

“An internal [UC} report in May 1995, based on a computer simulation, predicted that such a change would result in a 15 to 25 percent overall rise of Asian-Americans at the University of California, and as much as 25 to 35 percent increase at Berkeley and U.C.L.A., where 75 percent of students would be admitted on merit. The number of whites would remain about the same, but Hispanic students would dip 5 to 15 percent and African-Americans would drop somewhere between 40 and 50 percent.”

So without affirmative action, white student numbers would have been unchanged, but Asian-American student enrollment would have exploded. For some reason, in 1996, this didn’t resonate with California’s Asian population. Now it seems to be.

Good. As John Roberts said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

“The Big Reveal on Cal’s holistic admissions process created much fuss, most of it on behalf of Asians who are clearly the victims of discriminatory behavior.

“I’m fussed, too. But most people don’t completely understand how this ‘problem’ came about, and why the UC and other universities are discriminating against Asians. It’s not so much ‘affirmative action for whites’ as it is unintended consequences of being forbidden to use affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics.”

‘Immigrant Asians … kill whites on grades’

How did this play out? UC chose to …

“… de-emphasize those evil, racist tests that traditionally represent, in the typical progressive’s mind, a means of reinforcing the institutionalized hegemony of the white man’s values. Grades, in contrast, reflected the school’s values, the school’s priorities. So majority URM schools, both charters and inner city, can put whatever grades they like on classes that can be called whatever they want. UC officials made the change, along with Eligibility in the Local Context, so that majority URM schools could lie about their students’ academic abilities properly reflect the students’ diligence and abilities in subjects simply not valued by the institutional racists at the College Board.

“The problem is, alas, that UC admissions made changes to their policy based on the ‘demographic footprint’ of tests, but they forgot about the demographic footprint of grades.

“Namely: Asians, particularly recent immigrant Asians, kill whites on grades. The test score advantage is getting (suspiciously) worse, but the grade advantage is huge.

“That wasn’t part of the plan. Look, universities know the game as well as anyone: grades are a fraud. That’s why, until relatively recently, all universities weighted test scores as high or higher than grades.

“If high school grades were objectively accurate, why does the University of California have an entry level writing requirement?—and why is that writing requirement either a test or a college level course? (And I have my own doubts of college level courses, but more on that later.) … If high school grades meant anything, schools could just accept students with high grades and hey, presto. Problem solved.”

‘Any outrage is counterbalanced by another’

This is just a powerful, devastating analysis of the racial games that UC officials play. But it doesn’t lead to the tidy conclusion one might expect about UC admissions.

“You know what would have been much easier? Require four Subject tests: English Lit, Math 2c, American History, and a Science. Asians would still do well, but it would have been harder. Dump the SAT, dump or devalue grades. If nothing else, we’d be giving smart kids of all races a chance to show their stuff purely through test scores, imperfect as they may be, rather than the vagaries of teacher assessment.

“But that gets UC right back to the problem it started with, the reason it emphasized GPA over test scores in the first place, the problem that it created just to give them a cover story for ignoring the will of the California voters (and, eventually, the constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court). A test-score only admissions process would eliminate almost all blacks and Hispanics from consideration. The problem: every attempt to bring in more blacks and Hispanics leads to more Asians.

“Problem? Why is it a problem? Shouldn’t the universities just let the chips fall where they may? If the schools are overwhelmingly Asian, so what?

“Well, for starters, relying exclusively on grades leads to Kashawn Campbell at the low end—hell, Kashawn’s story singlehandedly reveals the need for test scores, the fraudulence of high school grades, and the sketchy nature of college grades in one neat little package.

“But more importantly, a huge number of the Asians admitted are either nationals or first and second generation Chinese, Koreans, and Indians.

“None of what I’ve written or will write is intended in any way to rationalize the discrimination against Asians. Quite the contrary. Any fair admissions process would lead to overrepresentation of Asians. But I hope to persuade readers that college admissions in its current form, in both private and public schools, is so corrupt that getting outraged about discrimination for or against any one demographic is pointless. Any outrage you find is counterbalanced by another, and no, it’s not as if it all works out.”

What a vivid account of how race works at UC, Prop 209 or no Prop 209, and of how college administrators think.

I encourage people to check out the Education Realist blog regularly.

By Chris Reed

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Fisher v. the University of Texas, the latest big affirmative-action case to reach SCOTUS. Conservative justices used their questions to establish how intentionally slippery and vague UT officials are in explaining how race is included as a factor in deciding admissions to their first-rate public university. Here’s a mainstream media account that doesn’t capture the verve with which John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy went after the University of Texas’ lawyer.

To students of California politics and academia, what should be especially interesting is how the justices deal with the claim that fuzzy, “holistic” judgments that lead to less-qualified minority students being admitted over much more-qualified white or Asian students are somehow less objectionable than hard quotas. In California, this “holistic” approach to college admissions was long ago revealed as an explicit attempt to game Proposition 209, the 1996 state law which bans racial quotas in state government.

The N.Y. Times figures out the UC ploy

And which journalistic outlet made this point best? The New York Times! Economics columnist David Leonhardt wrote a long piece in the Sunday magazine on Sept. 30, 2007, explaining how the UC system, especially UCLA, used fuzzy talk to advance a clearly racial agenda — one with far more benefits for the kids of affluent blacks and Hispanics than poor Asians (or poor whites).

Here was my take then:

“One of the aspects of the University of California system/affirmative action debate that consistently gets short shrift in media coverage is that in the old quota system, African-American and Latino students with less impressive scholastic records weren’t bumping white students, they were bumping Asian-American students. So Asian-Americans paid the biggest price for a policy that has as its central rationale the need to remedy the dominant white culture’s historic discrimination against minorities. Huh?

“So when I saw the long New York Times magazine article … I wasn’t sure what to expect. Here’s what I got: a 4,800-word article explaining and implicitly praising the possibly illegal ways that UC officials got around Proposition 209 and its ban on racial considerations in admission.

“I understand why some people might think this is a good thing. But I cannot understand why Leonhardt would mention the following pretty much in passing:

“Even as the number of low-income black freshmen [at UCLA] soared this year, the overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income Asian students — not a decline in well-off students. So under the old quota system, Asian-American students in general paid the price for society’s attempts to atone for white racism. Now under the new surreptitious affirmative-action program, poor Asian-American students are paying the highest price. If this is social justice, count me out.”

The Connerly perspective

Here is part of Ward Connerly’s take on Leonhardt’s telling essay on race and UC:

“‘The most useful lesson to be learned from Leonhardt’s article is that it would be prudent for those on both sides of the race preferences in college admissions debate to work toward some acceptable compromise for the good of our nation. …  We must also understand the national imperative of providing access to low income students and to those who are confronted with disadvantages that impede their ability to lead productive lives and to demonstrate their potential value to American society. It is not in our national interest to have hordes of people standing on the sidelines seething with anger because they cannot obtain a ticket to gain access to a better life in America. That ticket for most of us is higher education. Thus, those of us who believe in academic meritocracy must broaden how we view ‘merit.’ That largely means empowering admissions officers to search for talent from among all students and not just the “A” average, high SAT students. In short, socioeconomic ‘affirmative action,’ in a colorblind admissions process, can be that compromise.”

One factor or the factor?

This crucial detail in how affirmative action, disguised or otherwise, works was a focus of Justice Alito in Wednesday’s questioning:

“JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  The top 10 percent plan admits lots of  African Americans — lots of Hispanics and a fair number of African Americans. But you say, well, it’s — it’s faulty, because it doesn’t admit enough African Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of  the child of successful professionals in Dallas.  Now, that’s your argument? If you have -­you have an applicant whose parents are — let’s say they’re — one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part — is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?”

Like Jews and the Ivy League in the 1930s

Alito tied the University of Texas’ attorney in knots. I suspect the U.S. Supreme Court will end up limiting or killing affirmative action on a 5-3 vote next June (Elena Kagan recused herself). If that is what happens, California’s long, miserable record on affirmative action will have helped drive its demise.

This record goes back well before Prop. 209. By a quarter-century ago, it was apparent that innocent Asian-Americans were the victims of affirmative action in UC admissions, not historically oppressive whites. This is from a September 1987 Los Angeles Times story:

“There may be a parallel between what is happening to Asian-Americans now and what happened to Jews in the 1920s and 1930s at some Ivy League schools. … And, like Jews before them, the members of the new model minority contend that they have begun to bump up against artificial barriers to their advancement.

“Casual inspection of the Berkeley campus … makes any suggestion of anti-Asian bias seem implausible. Asians represent 6.7% of California’s population, but they account for 25.5% of the Berkeley student body. …

“But … the percentage of Asians in the student body might be even higher, the critics contend, if admissions were still based strictly on merit. Since the mid-1970s, both Americans of Asian descent and immigrants from Asia have so outperformed Caucasian, black and Latino students in high schools that universities have manipulated admissions criteria to hold back the Asian influx, say the critics.

“‘As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,’ said Ling-Chi Wang, a peppery Chinese-born professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley and one of the university’s severest critics. ‘Since then, Asian-American admissions rates have either stabilized or declined … university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem.'”

Affirmative action is a much easier sell when it is built on abstract talk about the historical effects of white racism. But when its reality is punishing another ethnic group in the name of atoning for white racism, it looks shabby — or, to use Chief Justice Roberts’ term, “sordid.”

This ugliness first became clear in California a generation ago.

Katy Grimes:

Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment that prohibits the government from granting educational or employment preferences to individuals based on race, was surprisingly upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Monday. The 9th Circuit had already issued a previous opinion in the 1990s upholding the voter-approved law.

But this decision appears to make have disappointed much of the media.

“Civil rights groups and aspiring minority college students have lost the latest bid to get the University of California to resume considering race in its admissions decisions,” the Los Angeles Times wrote.

“Affirmative action proponents took a hit Monday as a federal appeals court panel upheld California’s ban on using race, ethnicity and gender in admitting students to public colleges and universities,” wrote the Sacramento Bee.

“The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding so-called Proposition 209 comes as affirmative action resurfaces as a live issue at the top of the U.S. legal system,” Reuters reported.

Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Ralph Kasarda, argued in favor of the ban and upholding the law, and described the case as “redundant and baseless.”

“The bottom line from both decisions by the 9th Circuit – today’s and the ruling 15 years ago – is that California voters have every right to prohibit government from color-coding people and playing favorites based on individuals’ sex or skin color,” Kasarda said in a statement.

The case is now headed to the United States Supreme Court, which agreed to hear an appeal by a white female student applicant who was denied undergraduate admission in 2008 to the University of Texas at Austin.

There is plenty of precedence in this case. After the City of San Francisco continued giving  women and minorities an advantage in bidding for city contracts even after Prop 209 was voted into law, the Pacific Legal Foundation sued saying that the practice violated Proposition 209. In a 6-1 ruling in August 2010, the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 209 does not violate the federal constitution.

 Last year, in blatant violation of Proposition 209, the California Legislature passed SB 185, to require state colleges and universities to use race in admissions policies. Despite taking an oath to uphold the state’s constitution, the bill’s constitutionality appeared irrelevant to state legislators.

American Civil Rights Institute founder Ward Connerly, co-author of Prop 209, said that SB 185 was a “priority of the legislative Latino caucus. And the Latino caucus is the 800-pound elephant in the room,” having passed several educational preference bills this year.

Connerly said that SB 185 was shoved through the Legislature quickly, even after two previous attempts to pass nearly identical bills were vetoed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Despite Schwarzenegger’s veto messages that the bills were unconstitutional, Connerly said that Democrats figured that if they could get the bill to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk quickly, he would sign it. But he didn’t – Brown vetoed the bill, knowing that it couldn’t be upheld if legally challenged.

“Signing this bill is unlikely to impact how Proposition 209 is ultimately interpreted by the courts; it will just encourage the 209 advocates to file more costly and confusing lawsuits,” Brown wrote in the veto message.

The law is so inconvenient when it doesn’t fit the liberal agenda.