Escalating pension debt may rest on CA Supreme Court ruling

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. While it seems everyone is trying to get footage of Trump speaking candidly in recordings of “The Apprentice,” which we’ll call the “Trump tapes,” we start this morning with some pension news.

A decision by four Marin County public-employee associations to appeal a pension-related case to the California Supreme Court could ultimately determine whether localities have the tools needed to rein in escalating pension debt.

At issue is how far officials can go to reduce some benefits for current employees after a state appeals court has chipped away at a legal “rule” long favored by the state’s unions.

In August, a California appeals court ruled against the Marin County Employees’ Association in its case challenging a 2012 state law reining in pension-spiking abuses – i.e., those various end-of-career enhancements (unused leave, bonuses, etc.) that public employees use to gin up their final salary and their lifetime retirement pay. …

Even though the dollars at issue are relatively minimal, the case has become a major flashpoint. California courts have long abided by something known as the “California Rule.” It’s not a law or even a rule, actually. It refers to a series of court rulings concluding that once a pension benefit is granted to public employees by a legislative body (board of supervisors, city council, state Legislature), it can never be reduced – even going forward. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “(Secure Choice) has several provisions protecting the state (and employers, which are required to enroll employees into Secure Choice) against liability. … To protect against losses, the state plans to invest in low-risk securities, like treasury bonds or the federal MyRA program, while another section in the law allows for the state to adopt recommendations that address “risk-sharing and smoothing of market losses and gains.” CalWatchdog has more. 

• “Feminist attorney Gloria Allred, who has represented an army of women in legal actions against rich and powerful men — Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, Anthony Weiner and ex-Clippers owner Donald Sterling among them — is demanding the release of footage from Donald Trump’s reality show, ‘The Apprentice,'” reports Politico. 

• “When Palo Alto software entrepreneur Ron Unz led a campaign to ban bilingual education 18 years ago, California erupted in an acrimonious debate that drew national attention, with proponents expressing fears about the decline of English and opponents charging racism and predicting an educational Armageddon. But today, in a sign of the Golden State’s dramatically changing demographics and politics, the campaign to roll back the “English-only” Proposition 227 seems low-key and uncontroversial, overshadowed by a bevy of hot-button ballot initiatives and the emotionally charged presidential race,” writes The San Jose Mercury News. 

• “Opponents of Donald Trump have launched a crowdfunding effort to raise cash that could cover the legal costs of unveiling more lewd video featuring the GOP presidential candidate,” reports LA Weekly. 

Legislature:

• Gone ’til December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

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The state’s primary system pushes the top two candidates into the general election, regardless of party. As it stands now, Republicans will likely be out of the running after next Tuesday when voters submit their ballots.

If Republicans could coalesce around one candidate, they’d have a shot at one candidate making the November runoff. Republican candidates account for 20 percent of the vote among likely voters, with Sanchez, of Santa Ana, polling at 14 percent. 

However, the five highest-polling Republican candidates are between three and four percent a piece, with each having little incentive to drop out in favor of another. And none of the Republican candidates are well known and have raised little money to increase their name ID.  

“Republicans probably wish that someone could clear the field and unite the party behind one candidate,” said John J. Pitney, Jr., a Roy P. Crocker professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. “But nobody has that power.” 

Harris leads with 30 percent, having the backing of the California Democratic Party. But a large percentage of respondents are undecided —  27 percent said they either hadn’t made up their minds or are not voting — meaning a lot can happen on Tuesday.

Top Two

The top-two system, approved by voters in 2010, theoretically favors more moderate candidates by removing partisan primaries.

While Sanchez is widely viewed as the more centrist candidate, as one of the few remaining members of the fiscally-conservative Blue Dog Democrat coalition, Harris has nearly double the support among those who have declined to state a party preference, 16 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

But neither Harris nor Sanchez are polling well with Republicans, five percent and four percent, respectively. It’s unclear which way voters would lean after June, once the field narrows.

“It’s always a fallacy to extrapolate from a primary to tell what’ll happen in the general,” said Democratic strategist Garry South, who is not working with any of the candidates.

Voters want a dealmaker 

Another poll from last week showed 69 percent of voters prefer someone who “is willing to make compromises to get legislature passed over one who holds true to their beliefs without compromise.”

Despite her liberal philosophy and voting record, Boxer long ago mastered the art of legislating. Even at a time when Congress is getting little done, she managed to broker a deal last year on a highway bill with her ideological opposite, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

Harris does not have legislative experience for voters to draw from. Sanchez has run heavily on her reputation as a dealmaker, having made Congressional Quarterly’s recent list of the 25 most influential women in Washington, for being a “debate shaper and swing vote.”

With her legislative abilities, Sanchez changed how sexual assaults in the military are reported and tracked, thereby increasing accountability and consistently helped secure federal funding for Orange County’s groundwater replenishment system which provides water to millions of residents.

Yet the polls show voters still turning to Harris in larger numbers. South attributed this to Harris’ statewide name recognition, compared to Sanchez’s limited reach to mainly within her congressional district.

“She is a representative of one of the 53 seats in California, nobody knows her in the other 52,” South said, adding that a Democrat on Democrat race in the general could change the dynamic. 

Republicans

Arguably the two most well-known Republicans in the race are two former state party chairmen, Tom Del Beccaro and Duf Sundheim. Ron Unz, who ran for governor against fellow Republican Governor Pete Wilson and is an outspoken critic of bilingual education, seemed to raise his profile substantially during the two debates.

None of the three have raised enough money to compete though. Sundheim has raised $621,000, Del Beccaro has raised $365,000 and Unz has raised almost $52,000. All of that is nominal compared to Harris, who has raised almost $10 million, and Sanchez, who has raised $3.5 million.  

In a state with several expensive media markets and without any noteworthy amount of name ID, the financial shortcomings of the Republican candidates is holding them back.

“Nobody knows who any of them are and none have two nickles to rub together,” said South.

Particularly for a seat that’s rated “Safe Democrat” by The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report, Republican donors will largely look to spend money elsewhere on more competitive races. 

“Even if they could get a GOP candidate into the top two, that person would still lose the general election,” said Pitney. “The GOP leadership has to focus its very scarce resources on races it might win.”

Donald Trump has complicated the already difficult task California Republicans face in blunting Kamala Harris’s dominant campaign for Senate. 

With an already unfavorable race to replace Sen. Barbara Boxer ramping up, analysts have cautioned the GOP that Trump’s evident lock on the nomination will likely reverberate throughout the balloting on Election Day. “Republicans are already struggling to make headway in the 34-candidate primary,” the Washington Post reported. “The leading Democrats — Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez — now are even more likely to advance to November, California political operatives said following Trump’s Indiana victory [May 3].”

“Polls have consistently shown Harris leading the California race, with one out this week putting her support at 29 percent, followed by Sanchez with 18 percent. The next closest competitor is Republican Tom Del Becarro, a former chairman of the California Republican Party, who drew 10 percent support in the KABC/Survey USA poll. Close on his heels are Ron Unz, a Republican activist with 8 percent and Duf Sundheim, a former state party chairman, with 7 percent.”

Continuing a pattern of controversy and minor chaos surround the campaign, Trump’s delegate slate sent several shock waves through California and beyond. Former Republican Assemblyman Bob Pacheco wound up on the slate through no effort or intention of his own, prompting Pacheco to warn the campaign not to expect his support.

Delegate drama

And that was only the beginning. “The news comes the day after the revelation that a Los Angeles-area white nationalist had been named a member of Trump’s slate,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “A Trump aide said William Johnson’s inclusion on a list of delegates submitted Monday to the California secretary of state’s office was an error. The campaign has since said Johnson and Pacheco will be struck from the delegate rolls.” The ordeals, according to the Times, entrenched the view among Trump’s Golden State adversaries that his ground operation was a shambles:

“In California, Katie Lagomarsino is Trump’s delegate coordinator. But according to public records and a person who knows her, Lagomarsino is a 22-year-old who was in the midst of studying for college finals as the delegate selection process took place. She worked briefly as an assistant at a Sacramento-based political fundraising firm.”

No consensus has emerged as to which GOP Senate candidate stands the most to gain or lose thanks to Trump. “The problem for the party is that the leading Republicans in the Senate race — former state GOP chairmen Tom Del Beccaro and Duf Sundheim, and physicist and entrepreneur Ron Unz — are essentially unknown,” the Associated Press noted. “Del Beccaro and Sundheim have struggled with fundraising, and it’s not clear how much money Unz will commit to the race from his own checkbook.” 

Chasing attention

But as state Republicans begin to line up behind Trump, the exposure problem could disappear fast. From Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to Rep. Kevin McCarthy, leading officeholders have pitched their support as a matter of party loyalty and political honor, as the San Francisco Chronicle observed: “My fellow Republicans should grow up and admit that we have to do what the voters want to do, and we’re not in control, the voters are,” Rohrabacher said. Rep. Darrell Issa, who had earlier cautioned against nominating Trump, recently characterized anti-Trump diehards as members of “the consultant and donor classes, established opinion writers, think-tank officials and other Washington wise men.”

Given that landscape, Republican Senate candidates laboring for attention could find themselves with surprising opportunities to seize public attention. While the former chairmen could quickly rise to prominence by pitting themselves against the presumptive nominee, Unz could capitalize on the populist environment and present himself as offering all the disruptive advantages of Trump and none of the personality or policy-driven disadvantages. 

He jointed majority Democrats in a  vote of the California Senate Education Committee to recommended adding an initiative to the 2016 ballot that would restore bilingual education to the state public school system.

Though unable to dictate the votes of Sacramento’s Republican lawmakers, Huff is the Senate Republican Leader.

Bilingual education has been a point of contention in California politics for decades. A GOP switch on the issue would reflect perceived electoral and demographic pressure to woo more Hispanic votes.

But, ironically, one of the Republican Party’s most powerful unofficial leaders on Hispanic-friendly issues is the leading voice opposed to bilingual education.

Prop. 227

In 1998, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz succeeded in getting Proposition 227, an English-only education measure, voted into law.

Prop. 227 triggered several key changes. First, all public school instruction had to be conducted in English. However, parents or guardians could get an exemption by showing their child knew English, had special needs, or “would learn English faster through [an] alternate instructional technique.”

Second, children not fluent in English would be placed in “intensive sheltered English immersion programs” for about a year.

The changes drew California education into a long, drawn-out controversy over what “the science” proved about Prop. 227’s effectiveness. Ten years into the new regime, Unz trumpeted studies that showed students affected by English-only education had doubled their test scores.

Some educators argued that Prop. 227 was more motivated by ideology than facts. But that claim ran contrary to a revealing fact about Unz himself, who does not at all fit the profile of the stereotypical English-only California Republican.

Rather than a hard-liner on immigration, Unz takes a much softer view. An unorthodox thinker who once published the American Conservative magazine, Unz wrote a feature of his own which proposed to debunk the myth of Hispanic immigrant lawlessness. What’s more, Unz recently sought to raise California’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.

In an impassioned broadside against the state Senators, Unz has restated the political case for English-only education. “We were opposed by every California union, every political slate, and almost every newspaper editorial board,” he wrote, “and were outspent on advertising by a ratio of 25-to-1. But despite this daunting array of influential opponents, our initiative still passed with one of the largest political landslides of any contested measure in state history, winning over 61 percent of the vote.”

Unz is not shying away from warning Republicans that returning to bilingual education will damage their already dire electoral fortunes. For Unz, the “disastrous political choices made by California Republicans during the 1990s” sent “the most powerful Republican state party in America” to “the very edge of irrelevance.”

Restoring “failed” bilingual education, he concluded “would probably mark the final nail” in the state party’s coffin, “and rightfully so.”

In the wake of Huff’s play to change California Republicans’ brand, Unz has thrown down a gauntlet.

Although a single activist can rarely determine the course of a state party’s platform, Unz’s nontraditional views on Hispanics, education, and economics give cover to Republicans eager not to be smeared as racists by Democrats sensing a political opportunity to charge up their listless base for November.

(Editor’s note. This article has been corrected. The original said Sen. Mark Wyland also backed the legislation. I fact, he abstained.)

“[State policies give] many school districts a perverse incentive to keep immigrant kids in bilingual programs rather than moving them into English-language instruction.

“It should be remembered that a rapid but successful transition to English was the aim of bilingual education when it was begun in the 1970s. But like other noble experiments, it was taken over — and distorted — by education bureaucrats who care more about money and numbers than individual children.”

Claims that bilingual ed was crucial to help first-generation Latino immigrants assimilate were simply false. Here’s what Santa Barbara school board member Alan Ebenstein had to say in March 1998:

“One of the great misunderstandings regarding bilingual education is that it is a program intended mostly or even largely for students who are not born in the United States. This school year, 8.5% of Latino kindergarteners in Santa Barbara schools were not born in the United States, yet approximately 85% of Latino kindergarteners are receiving most of their instruction in Spanish. Bilingual education in California is predominantly a program to teach American children of Latino descent in Spanish for most of their elementary school years.”

Myths about bilingual ed revived

But this history has been forgotten or ignored by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, who has introduced a bill to have a public revote on allowing and encouraging bilingual education. Check out the whoppers Lara offers in defense of his proposal:

“’English will always remain the official language of California, but we cannot ignore the growing need to have a multilingual workforce,’ Lara said.

“He said the global economy requires those who graduate from school to be able to communicate in multiple languages. ‘Employers seek multilingual employees and all students — English and non-English learners alike — deserve access to this invaluable skill,’ Lara added.”

That’s from a short L.A. Times’ web account of Lara’s bill. Here’s hoping subsequent reporting points out that California’s history with bilingual education hardly shows it was an efficient way of producing a multilingual workforce. Instead, it produced hundreds of thousands of high school dropouts who never mastered any language.

But there’s a larger and more sweeping context here. This could be the first sign of what eventually could be a powerful movement in which Latinos seek to make California akin to Quebec, where French is treated with at least as much official deference and respect as English, the language of the rest of Canada.

California as a Spanish-language version of Quebec

Why might something like this happen in the Golden State? Because it’s a dramatic display of power by a group slowly but surely on its way to control of the state’s largest political party. Emerging political juggernauts like such displays. And as del Olmo wrote in 1998 …

“A small but vocal cadre of Latino activists support [bilingual education] in the misguided assumption that bilingual programs promote cultural pride in Latino kids … .”

Is it nativist to worry about this possibility? If you’re one of those people who grouse about Spanish-language signs over stores, sure. If you’re someone who is annoyed to hear Spanish spoken by fast-food workers, damn right. If you’re someone who watches “Leave It To Beaver” or “My Three Sons” and pines for the America of the 1950s, absolutely.

But if you’re someone who knows bilingual education was a giant flop last time around — something that produced students who didn’t speak either English or Spanish well — then it’s not nativist to worry about its resurrection and the motives behind it.

Latinos have enough problems with a California school system that worries more about the interests of adult employees than students. They don’t need to be subject to a risky education experiment that history shows is likely to fail.

For now, these larger questions can wait until we see where Ricardo Lara’s legislation goes. In the short term, I look forward to Sen. Lara offering any proof of his claims for what bilingual education will accomplish in California.

He won’t, because he can’t. The evidence doesn’t exist.