The firestorm over a recent New York Times 

The revelations came via the discovery phase of a lawsuit targeting Harvard for allegedly having de facto quotas meant to limit Asian-Americans to about 20 percent of incoming freshman classes – a percentage that has held relatively firm for decades. Internal documents appeared to confirm that low marks for alleged personality traits reduced how many Asian-Americans would have been accepted by about half. Several other Ivy League schools have also been accused of similar practices.

University of California campuses wouldn’t seem likely to face such potential headaches. Proposition 209, passed in 1996, bans the use of race as a consideration in college admissions and other state government functions. Some of UC’s most elite campuses – at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego – have student bodies that are more than 40 percent Asian-American.

But when it comes to UCLA, where 32 percent of students are Asian-American, according to collegedata.com, the school could face embarrassment if its internal admissions processes were exposed by a lawsuit as happened with Harvard. That’s because there’s a long paper trail showing UCLA employed the same sort of subjective evaluations of applicants as Harvard.

In 2006, responding to disappointingly low enrollment numbers for African-Americans, UCLA officials adopted a “holistic” approach that they said represented the “most dramatic” changes in admissions in years – an approach they explicitly compared to those seen in Ivy League schools. This approach looked not just at grades and test scores but at life circumstances.

But even as the change was introduced, Ward Conerly – the African-American former UC regent who championed Proposition 209 – ridiculed the idea that the policy would be “fairer” to all groups, as acting Chancellor Norman Abrams then said.

Two years later, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned from the university’s undergraduate admissions committee, alleging it had become obvious that UCLA was using the latitude provided by subjective assessments of applicants to favor African-Americans over others. Groseclose challenged UCLA’s assertion that it was using socioeconomic backgrounds – not race – in evaluating what obstacles that applicants had overcome. He noted that after the UCLA policy change, admissions of students from Vietnamese-American families – among the poorer subsets of Asian-Americans – had actually fallen.

In defending its “holistic” approach, UCLA officials have pushed back, then and now, saying critics had agendas and were cherry-picking statistics.

Ex-UCLA professor: Rich black applicants favored over poor Asians

But in April 2014, soon after leaving UCLA for George Mason University, Groseclose published “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.” It cited internal documents that showed that an applicant from a wealthy African-American family had a likelihood of admission that was “almost double that of a poor Asian, even when the two applicants have identical grades, SAT scores and other factors.”

The book was published amid intense debate in the California Legislature over Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, which would have asked state voters to repeal part of Proposition 209 to allow for race to be considered in college admissions. It passed the state Senate in January 2014, with Lieu – then a state senator – among the yes votes.

But the constitutional amendment was never voted on in the Assembly. By May 2014, it had been scrapped after an intense backlash from Chinese-Americans who believed it would suppress Asian-American enrollment in UC’s most elite campuses.

The backlash was strongly criticized by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which urged a continuation of traditional Asian-American support for affirmative-action-type programs. But then-Rosemead Councilwoman Polly Low, a leader of the Chinese American Elected Officials Association, told the Los Angeles Times that many in the local Chinese community were incensed with SCA5. “I have never seen so many people so mad,” she said.

The current MID – which allows taxpayers to deduct interest on up to the first $1 million of mortgage debt – has been a boon to the state’s homeowners. The median price of a California home is home nearly $510,000, according to Zillow. In Los Angeles County and Orange County, it’s even more: $574,400 and $691,600, respectively. However, the median price in the booming Inland Empire remains significantly lower: $347,700 for Riverside County and $314,000 for San Bernardino County.

The state and local tax deduction disproportionately benefits those with higher incomes in states with higher tax burdens. According to the Tax Foundation, with an average gross income (AGI) of $73,938, 33.9 percent of filers in California take advantage of the deduction, which amounts to almost 8 percent of AGI.

Meanwhile, the median value of this deduction is less than 4.5 percent, and, per the Tax Foundation, California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania “claim more than half of the value of all state and local tax deductions nationwide.”

As to be expected, many of California’s political representatives have chimed in. Here are a few of their responses:

Jerry Brown penned a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista: “I implore you to vote NO or to ask for more time so that Californians can have a chance to find out about the real impact of this proposal. Getting rid of an individual’s ability to deduct his or her California taxes is a horrible idea, but it is made far worse when you preserve – at the same time – the right of corporations to take those same deductions. Can you tell me how much your neighbors and fellow citizens will have to pay because of this proposal?”

Darrell Issa defended himself and the GOP plan in a letter of his own: “It seemed only fitting to take this opportunity to highlight your expertise on – as your letter states – ‘horrible ideas’ on tax policy. I recognize the role of the state and local tax deduction to reduce the tax burden on many Californians, but let’s be clear: it has only become of such importance as a direct result of the tremendous weight that your misguided policies have put on California taxpayers.” Issa concluded, “Rather than sending contrived letters pretending to care about the burdens placed on taxpayers in our state, I implore you to turn away from the era of ever-increasing taxes that have continued under your administration and instead seek policies that actually lower the tax burden on all Californians.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, defended the plan: “Today, we moved closer to enacting reform that will encourage American companies to bring American jobs back to American towns, allow people to spend minutes, not days, doing their taxes, and help increase wages by $4,000 for the average family because of faster economic growth. We’re moving forward at a fast pace because America has so much to gain when we get this done.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, in a press release published on Halloween, stated, “The GOP plan to double tax middle class families’ incomes shows the fundamental rottenness at the core of their tax bill. Middle class families get tricked, billionaires get treats. Republicans should abandon their broken middle-class tax hike bill, and work with the Democrats for real bipartisan tax reform that puts the middle class first and delivers A Better Deal to the American people.”

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, decried, “The GOP tax plan is absurd. Their proposal to eliminate the state and local tax deduction will lead to a massive tax hike for middle class families in California.” He also “double dare[d]” the state’s moderate Republicans – who “should know better” – to vote for “this ridiculous tax plan.”

This often comes in the form of divestment, by which the funds are encouraged – or even required – to sell their assets in industries that are viewed negatively by the people who push these efforts. These efforts tend to work against the goals of the funds’ professional investment staff, which are charged with getting high investment returns to fund pensions for the systems’ retirees. Both funds have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize their return on taxpayer dollars.

Yet estimates from a consulting firm suggest that CalPERS has lost approximately $8 billion in returns because of previous efforts to divest from coal-related and tobacco industries. That’s become a particularly contentious issue as funding levels have fallen to 68 percent for CalPERS and 64 percent for CalSTRS. That means they have only around two-thirds of the assets needed to make good on all the current and future pension promises made to government retirees.

Despite the troubling numbers, there’s a new push for divestment from some politicians. Following the October massacre in Las Vegas, by which a gunman murdered 59 people at a country music concert, state Treasurer John Chiang has called for the teachers’ fund to sell its assets in weapons firms and sporting-goods companies that sell any guns that are illegal in California.

“Neither taxpayer funds nor the pension contributions of any of the teachers we represent, including the three California teachers slain in Las Vegas should be invested in the purveyors of military-style assault weapons,” said Chiang, a 2018 candidate for governor and member of both pension boards. Chiang also told the Sacramento Bee that he plans on making a similar request to the CalPERS board.

The newspaper also noted that both funds “this year have faced calls to divest from companies that do business with the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline,” which would transport oil underground from North Dakota oilfields to Illinois. It has prompted protests from a variety of environmental and Native American activists.

Critics of these proposals say they are largely symbolic and would do little to influence gun sales or the pipelines. Divestment from these relatively small industries wouldn’t have much impact on the massive funds’ financial returns, either.

On Oct. 30, 12 members of California’s Democratic congressional delegation sent a letter to CalPERS chief executive officer Marcie Frost urging the pension fund to divest from a fund that has acquired a hotel owned by Donald Trump’s organization. This move is more directly political than many divestment efforts, which tend to focus on the social implications of investing in the pipeline, weapons manufacturers, coal-related industries and tobacco companies.

Divestment advocates sometimes argue that these controversial products may be poor long-term investments. For instance, the Public Divestiture of Thermal Coal Companies Act of 2015 and similar efforts by the state insurance commissioner were based in part on the notion that these coal-related companies may face diminishing values as the world shifts away from carbon-based fuels – a point rebutted by those who note that the current price of the stocks already reflects that risk.

But the Trump-related divestment call, led by U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of Torrance, is designed to target the president. The members of Congress expressed their disappointment that CalPERS “has not divested its interest” in that fund “nor has taken any actions to ensure that its fees are not being transferred to President Trump,” according to their letter. They criticized CalPERS for taking a “wait-and-see” approach toward the matter.

These members of Congress claim that this CalPERS investment could be in violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” This would be an unusual interpretation of an arcane clause.

Meanwhile, the pension funds have been expanding other divestment and socially motivated investment efforts. Last December, the CalPERS investment staff “recommended that the board remove its 16-year ban on tobacco investments in light of an increasing demand to improve investment returns and pay benefits,” according to a Reuters report. But instead of removing the ban, the board “voted to remain divested and to expand the ban to externally managed portfolios and affiliated funds.”

And last year CalPERS adopted a five year Environmental, Social and Governance plan that focuses on socially responsible investing. The fund has long used its financial clout to push companies it invests in to promote, for instance, board diversity and other social goals.

Whatever their chances for approval, the latest efforts are not out of the ordinary. But they will rekindle the long-running debate between political and financial goals, and whether the former imperils the latter given both funds’ large unfunded liabilities.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Federal legislation

At the center of the proposals is the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Los Angeles campus, located on the west side of town near the 405 freeway. As the Los Angeles Times reported, a January legal settlement paved the way for the campus to pivot toward housing vets — and away from lease arrangements extended in the past to “corporations, the private Brentwood school and other non-government entities.”

Under the new regime envisioned by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, the VA would receive the authority to “enter into leases with local governments and nonprofit groups to provide veterans with shelter supplemented by medical and other services,” according to the Times. As Southern California Public Radio noted, education and training were among the additional services anticipated.

In recent years, the VA has been wracked by scandals offending Republicans and Democrats alike, with blame cast at the Obama administration, Congress and the VA bureaucracy itself. Now, however, the VA has put its own stamp of approval on the new bill; according to SCPR, it offers the VA — currently mired in a multibillion-dollar funding shortfall and juggling unfinished projects — an opportunity to “create new housing in West L.A. much faster than the agency could on its own.” In a statement, SCPR noted, the VA asserted that passing the Feinstein-Boxer legislation would “greatly enhance” its “ability to end Veteran homelessness in Greater Los Angeles.”

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has vowed to ensure all veterans are off the city’s streets by the end of this year. “In January, the mayor’s office announced 3,375 homeless veterans were housed in L.A. in 2014, and an estimated 3,154 homeless veterans remain on the street,” as the Los Angeles Daily News has observed.

Housing battles

California has recently become emblematic of increasing rates of homelessness in major urban areas, as the two Senators, along with Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, noted in their letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees. “There is a critical need for long-term supportive housing on the West Los Angeles campus, and enhanced use leases would allow the department to work with community and state organizations toward the goal of ending veteran homelessness in Los Angeles,” they wrote, according to the Daily News. “As you may be aware, Los Angeles is home to the largest population of homeless veterans in the country, which is simply unacceptable.”

From Downtown to westside neighborhoods such as Venice, altercations involving homeless persons and police — sometimes resulting in death — have made headlines in Los Angeles. Recently, in San Pedro, controversy erupted over the appearance of small wheeled shacks designed to supply the homeless with shelter that could evade permitting regulations. L.A. City Councilman Joe Buscaino warned “that the city needs more permanent housing” instead of structures that would “ultimately become nuisances,” the Times reported.

In addition to the situation in Los Angeles, events unfolding in other Southland locales have also attracted attention. This month, formerly homeless veterans in Huntington Beach pressed ahead with a lawsuit challenging construction regulations they claim adversely affect prospects for housing. “The litigation comes in response to the Huntington Beach City Council on May 4 adopting an amendment that blocks the development of affordable housing in the Beach-Edinger Corridor,” as the OC Weekly reported. “The veterans, commission and their lawyers contend the Beach-Edinger Corridor Specific Plan is in direct conflict with the city’s own General Plan Housing Element, which was approved by the California Department of Housing and Community Development in 2013.”

Legislators considered scrapping the Medical Board entirely, then settled for a less punitive approach. But concern about how the state agency operates is once again back in the news, and the focus is once again on its leaders’ attitude about painkillers. The Los Angeles Times has details:

An Orange County doctor accused of gross negligence in the care of two patients who fatally overdosed on drugs he prescribed has been placed on probation by the Medical Board of California.

 

Van H. Vu, who owns a busy pain clinic in Huntington Beach, agreed not to contest the board’s accusation, to take classes in prescribing and record keeping and to submit to an outside practice monitor for five years. In exchange, the board allowed Vu to keep his license and continue prescribing potent painkillers.

This has rekindled the complaints made in 2013 that the Medical Board is too sympathetic toward doctors accused of wrongdoing and not concerned enough about public safety.

Doctor linked to more than a dozen overdose deaths

A 2012 investigation of Vu by the Times showed a pattern of practice that dumbfounded independent medical authorities:

Avoids ‘uncertainty of a trial’

An official with the American Association of Pain Medicine condemned Vu in 2012, saying his prescription practices were grossly inappropriate and reflected an ignorance of the danger of such drugs as Oxycodone.

It’s not clear how much weight such observations carried with the Medical Board in deciding Vu’s punishment earlier this month. But the agency’s spokeswoman defended its light sanctions as serving the public’s interest “by avoiding the expense and uncertainty of a trial.”

“It makes the resolution faster,” spokeswoman Cassandra Hockenson told the Times. “We still have the upper hand. He will be watched very, very closely. … If he deviates one iota from these probationary requirements, revocation is back on the table.”

The Vu case could rekindle interest in the Legislature in making changes to the Medical Board. But it is uncertain who would lead such a campaign. The two state senators who led the push for the 2013 reform measure are no longer in Sacramento. Curren Price was elected to the Los Angeles City Council and Ted Lieu was elected to Congress.

The Vu case could spur yet another push to increase the state’s 30-year-old cap of $250,000 on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases.

California voters, however, have backed the cap — most recently last November, when state voters rejected Proposition 46, which would have made big changes in the 1975 law.

Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed into law a bipartisan bill that would ban the state from cooperating with warrantless spying by the federal government.

Senate Bill 828, co-authored by Sens. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, and Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, would ban state officials from complying with a federal agency’s request for electronic data if the state knows that request is illegal or unconstitutional. The bill is a response to the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance programs that collected phone and electronic data on millions of American citizens.

Lieu stands up for 4th Amendment

Dubbed the 4th Amendment Protection Act, the bill sailed through both houses of the Legislature without opposition.

“I commend Gov. Brown for recognizing that the National Security Agency’s massive and indiscriminate collecting of phone and electronic data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a threat to our liberty and freedom,” Lieu said. “We can only hope the feds halt this illegal and unconstitutional practice nationally.”

Supporters of the bill, which include the American Civil Liberties Union of California, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the Consumer Federation of California, say that the new law is a symbolic victory for constitutional principles.

“The federal government’s dragnet collection of millions of phone records and metadata is very troubling,” said CAIR-Sacramento Valley Executive Director Basim Elkarra. “We are happy to see California leading the way in pushing back against the unconstitutional data collection by the NSA and ensuring the observance of the Fourth Amendment, as a basic principle of this nation’s founding and democratic values.”

Orwellian technology exposed by Snowden

As CalWatchDog.com first reported in January, Lieu’s legislation comes in response to last summer’s revelations by former defense contractor and government whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting phone data on millions of Americans. In December, a federal judge ruled that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records is likely unconstitutional.

“The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” Judge Richard Leon wrote in his December ruling.

California’s new law covers “electronically stored information,” which is any data stored in a digital form, as well as the metadata surrounding any communication. Metadata is the “data about data” and can include the time, date, location, duration, origin or identity of the persons. In many cases, such information can be as revealing as the content of a call or email itself.

“New technology is demonstrating just how sensitive metadata can be: how friend lists can reveal a person’s sexual orientation, purchase histories can identify a pregnancy before any visible signs appear, and location information can expose individuals to harassment for unpopular political views or even theft and physical harm,” the American Civil Liberties Union of California explained in its February 2014 white paper, “Metadata: Piecing Together a Privacy Solution.”

Feds occasionally rely on state for data

According to the legislative analysis, federal agencies occasionally rely “upon services provided by the state and/or private entities that provide services on behalf of the state” in order to illegally collect data.

“SB 828 makes clear that the state of California will continue to uphold the Fourth Amendment rights of its citizens, even under pressure from the federal government,” said Anderson, the Republican coauthor of the bill. “Our nation is unequivocally dedicated to stopping terrorism, yet we must be ever vigilant that our desire for safety does not come at the expense of the freedoms and liberty our enemies seek to destroy.”

The new law, which is less than 200 words in length, is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2015. Here’s the text of the bill:

Senate Bill 828: 4th Amendment Protection Act

The state shall not provide material support, participation, or assistance in response to a request from a federal agency or an employee of a federal agency to collect the electronically stored information or metadata of any person if the state has actual knowledge that the request constitutes an illegal or unconstitutional collection of electronically stored information or metadata.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 980, by state Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, which expands access to DNA testing for prisoners who are searching to prove their innocence.

Since 1989, 311 U.S. prisoners have received post-conviction exonerations with the help of DNA testing. Most of those convictions have occurred in the last 14 years as DNA science has improved.

“This new law will protect those for whom justice has fallen short,” Lieu said in a press release announcing the governor’s signature. “These DNA-exoneration cases have provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events, but arise from systemic defects that can be precisely identified and addressed.”

SB980: More testing, more disclosure

Sponsored by the California Innocence Project and the Northern California Innocence Project, SB980 clarifies existing law to grant prisoners access to DNA testing, even when the testing would not definitely prove innocence. Beginning Jan. 1, law enforcement agencies will be required to disclose more information about the existence of biological evidence as well as give more notice before the destruction of evidence.

Alex Simpson, associate director of the California Innocence Project, said that the new law will help aid those in their quest for justice.

“Many of these people served decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit,” Simpson said. “SB980 would help ensure that innocent people get access to evidence that can prove their innocence.”

Innocence Project: Most cynical of all about wrongful convictions

The California Innocence Project, part of the California Western School of Law in San Diego, has helped secure the release of 11 inmates in California prisons. You might think such a project is staffed by naive bleeding hearts.

“I’m pretty darn cynical,” Justin Brooks, the project’s director, told UT San Diego columnist Steven Greenhut earlier this year.

The legal clinic goes through a systematic review process to find the few cases with credible claims of innocence.

“Of the thousands of cases his team reviews, they usually end up with one or two,” Greenhut wrote. “These are cases where he is 100-percent convinced of the inmate’s innocence. But even when the evidence is strong, it’s hard to get action on the cases.”

Public safety, taxpayer savings

Lieu, who is running for Congress, pointed out that wrongful convictions are also a matter of public safety because the real perpetrator remains on the streets.

“I want to thank Gov. Brown for his courage in signing legislation that promises to help correct the unspeakable offense of a wrongful conviction of an innocent person,” said Lieu, a former Air Force JAG prosecutor who remains in the reserves. “Compounding this heinous action is the fact the true perpetrator remains free to prey on all of us.”

Despite the expenditure on new tests, Lieu believes there may also be a potential savings to taxpayers.

“Because for the rest of their life, they won’t be in prison taking taxpayers’ money – they’ll be out,” Lieu told Government Technology earlier this year. “So we believe this bill’s costs will be offset by the amount we save.”

In the Assembly, only Assemblyman Steve Fox, D-Palmdale, opposed the bill. In the state Senate, three Republicans opposed the measure: Tom Berryhill of  Twain Harte, Mike Morrell of Rancho Cucamonga and Jim Nielsen of Gerber.

SB980: What it does

According to Lieu’s office, SB980 would:

• Require law enforcement agencies to provide information and/or documentation about the existence of biological evidence, such as whether it has been destroyed or preserved. In addition, the bill would allow courts to order unknown DNA profiles to be run through the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System database to identify the true perpetrator, as long as such a search does not violate state or national rules.
• Clarify that the standard to get DNA testing (1) does not require a showing that the DNA testing will prove innocence; and (2) in determining whether to grant testing, the court should not decide that the evidence, if exculpatory, would actually require that the person be released from prison.
• Extend from 90 days to 180 days the notice period law enforcement agencies must give prior to destroying evidence; and also extend from six months to one year the time allowed for the filing of a request for DNA testing.

“I am really angry. Nothing prepared any of us for this surprise announcement by Toyota. The fact is thousands of families in our community are directly impacted by this decision – families who depend on Toyota for their livelihoods. I’ve spent this morning acquiring as much information as I can and am preparing my office to do everything it can to help these families and friends during this difficult transition for our community.” 

Yet given that almost every week brings news of a major company — Occidental, Raytheon, Trend Micro — leaving for Texas, who really can be surprised? I sure wasn’t.

And Lieu himself bears some of the blame for California’s horrible business climate. Let’s just look at some recent news releases right on his website after his Toyota outrage missive:

“SACRAMENTO –  Sen. Ted Lieu today joined Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, Stop Hermosa Beach Oil and Heal the Bay at the Hermosa Beach Pier to announce legislation designed to assist the City if voters uphold the ban on oil drilling.”

Granted, the ocean view is nicer without oil derricks popping up. But if you want a car company, don’t you also need oil for the cars?

“SACRAMENTO – State Sen. Ted Lieu of Torrance has been given an 89-percent score by the California Environmental Justice Alliance, a rating that was not exceeded by any other lawmaker in the 120-member Legislature, for key votes cast on nine bills during the 2013 session of the Legislature.” 

I checked the scorecard. One bill that garnered Lieu a high score was AB 1165. According to the Alliance, it “Would have required an employer that is cited for a ‘serious,’ ‘willful,’ or ‘repeat’ violation of employee safety rules to abate the hazard identified by the citation, even if the employer appeals the citation.”

That is, even if you were not guilty of the violation, and were appealing it, you still had to “abate” the non-hazard!

AB 1165 was so radical that Gov. Jerry Brown, no slouch on environmental matters, vetoed it. He wrote in his veto message:

“Unfortunately, this measure would require the creation of a separate hearing process at the Division of Occupational Safety and Health — duplicating an expedited Cal/OSHA Appeals Board process which was recently adopted.”

Of course, a future Gov. Gavin Newsom or Gov. Kamala  Harris might sign a similar bill.

No wonder Toyota left. The only “surprise” was that they didn’t leave sooner.

After almost 18 years of a ban on using affirmative action in college admissions after the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, state Democrats set about working to overturn the law. The plan was for SCA 5, by state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, to pass both houses of the Legislature and secure voter approval. It would have brought back affirmative action.

That’s not the way things are turning out, thanks to California’s Asian-Americans.

Last week, saying they had received thousands of calls and emails from constituents, state Sens. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco; Ted Lieu, D-Torrance; and Carol Liu, D-La Cañada-Flintridge, asked Assembly Speaker John Perez to stop the bill.

“As lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children,” they wrote in a letter to Perez.

Now, SCA 5 is dead in the water — much to the delight of Republicans, who have championed the affirmative action ban all along.

Asian-Americans

Key to the sudden momentum shift are the complex of interests and alliances surrounding Asian-Americans. The San Jose Mercury News notes that the group’s historic support for affirmative action led state Democrats to assume SCA 5 faced clear sailing. More than a few organizations, the Mercury News reports, tout affirmative action as a benefit to some Asian communities that remain statistically underrepresented in colleges and universities.

The cognitive dissonance playing out around affirmative action in California underscores what’s at stake as different activist and interest groups struggle to lay down clearer markets in the identity politics debate. “What we need now,” one Asian-American Studies scholar told The New York Times, “is not to group everyone together into some mythical model minority but to have greater nuance in understanding Asian-American groups.” Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders needed special attention, she added.

Different kinds of colleges and universities have different kinds of access to affirmative-action outcomes. Ivy League schools, for instance, pride themselves on admitting at least one student per year from every state in the union, and every corner of the globe. America’s elite universities often possess more than an interest in recruiting star applicants from far-flung locales. They often possess a unique ability to attract him or her.

For less prestigious institutions of higher education, checking the long list of identity-political boxes is a taller order. There, the process of ensuring the level of ethnic, national, and regional diversity demanded by advocates tends to give way to broader goals — adding to the Asian portion of the student body, for instance, instead of increasing the number of Pacific Islanders.

That’s a trend which increases the role played by ethnic studies professors and identitarian organizations, to whom college administrators look for approval when trying to determine whether campus diversity levels meet or exceed expectations.

Ironically, the predominantly Chinese opposition to SCA 5 reflects an attitude toward upward mobility and a college degree that compounds the anxiety facing less-well-off Asian-Americans looking for social advancement through education. The political push against SCA 5 played off of Chinese-American fears, as Steven Hsieh put it in The Nation, “that students would lose university spots to underrepresented minorities if affirmative action is reinstated.”

For many Chinese-Americans, college is not just one option among many for the rising generation, but a make-or-break experience against which family success must be judged. As San Gabriel city councilman Chin Ho Liao bluntly argued, “Other ethnic groups don’t put their kids’ education as number one priority. You don’t realize how much Asian parents sacrifice.”

Case study

Protracted debates continue to swirl around just how much it benefits kids to be admitted into colleges where, for any reason, success eludes their grasp. As the Los Angeles Times reported in its 2013 case study of UC Berkeley freshman Kashawn Campbell, enrolling students in the quest for optimal diversity can usher in a host of unintended consequences.

The consequences include the kind of quiet contempt among fellow students that encourages campus thought policing to an even more unfortunate sense of inadequacy and fraudulence among affirmative-action beneficiaries.

Given the durability of the status quo in California, the U.S. Supreme Court offers a few useful guidelines:

• In Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, the court outlawed explicit racial and ethnic quotas.
• In Grutter vs. Bollinger, the majority affirmed that taking diversity into account was still acceptable.
• In last year’s Fisher vs. Texas ruling, the court insisted colleges and universities demonstrate that looking at race was essential to increasing diversity.

Now, a decision is soon to come down in Schuette vs. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, where justices have considered whether a Michigan ballot initiative may make it illegal for state officials — including at public universities — to “discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Outreach

Among states potentially impacted by the Schuette ruling, California is already ahead of the game in one sense: the state’s Early Academic Outreach Program, first established in 1976, has become an effective means of boosting diversity by targeting economically disadvantaged students. A survey of the program at The Atlantic summarized the program’s results:

“The percentage of Latino and Chicano resident freshmen admitted to UC has increased, from 11.9 percent in 1998, two years after the affirmative action ban, to 27.6 in 2013. The increase of African American resident freshmen admits was more modest, from 3 percent, in 1998, to 4.2 percent in 2013.”

EAOP hasn’t restored minority admissions to the levels attained before California’s affirmative action ban. But it has increased them in a manner more consistent with state and federal law.

By Chris Reed

On Friday, I noted that the state budget scrum always involved a series of hardball power plays that exposed as fiction the idea that the California Democratic Party and the most powerful forces on the state’s political left stood for “social justice.”

The trigger for this observation were the reports that unions were staying silent about pushes to restore the cuts in social services disproportionately used by the poor and the needy. Why all this balking? All the public employee unions are entering contract negotiations. The leaders of the dominant faction of the party of “social justice” define social justice as more money for them.

Over the weekend saw another example of hardball power politics that reflected I’ve-got-mine attitudes, not a desire for social justice. The issue was Jerry Brown’s push to award slightly more money to schools that have high numbers of English-learner students. If you buy the widespread but very disputable theory that more money means better schools — as the social justice types almost always do — then a slight divergence of funds to struggling students is a no-brainer. Rich districts have more fat in rough times than poor districts. Poor kids need more help, etc.

When ‘social justice’ = bringing home the bacon

But that’s not what “social justice” means to Democrats from west Los Angeles County or the Bay Area or any district with a well-regarded school district or two. For these Democrats, suddenly social justice means bringing home the bacon, the Sac Bee reports:

Gov. Jerry Brown had hardly finished presenting his annual budget revision last week before state Sen. Ted Lieu lit up on Twitter with a burst of criticism of a major part of the plan, a bid to shift more state aid to poor and English-learning students.

‘Instead of working together to help all kids,’ said Lieu, D-Torrance, Brown’s funding formula ‘pits teacher against teacher, community against community, parent against parent.'”

Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Status Quo

The article goes on to note that skeptics include Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, and Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. More:

“In many ways, resistance to Brown’s proposal to overhaul California’s school financing system is a function of simple math.

“Though a majority of California’s more than 6 million schoolchildren live in urban and rural districts expected to benefit from Brown’s proposal, all but a handful of lawmakers who will vote on the measure represent at least one school district identified by the Department of Education as a potential loser. …

“Brown was on the defensive last week, laboring to ‘clarify some common misperceptions’ about his plan. He said the most controversial part of his proposal — to provide money to especially needy districts at the expense of wealthier ones— would amount to just 4 percent of total spending, with the rest distributed on a per-pupil basis partly to all students and partly to disadvantaged students statewide.

Gov’s idea — Dems help disadvantaged — meets reality

This is funny — the governor forced to downplay the cost of a model “social justice” proposal to win over Democratic lawmakers. Still, at least while doing so, Jerry Brown delivered a seemingly mild observation that actually amounts to a pointed zinger.

“Asked if he thought he had done enough to mollify resistant lawmakers, Brown said, ‘I think the idea in a Democratic Legislature of helping the less advantaged is very persuasive.'”

One would think. One would think. At least if one were dumb enough to still believe that California’s elected Democrats believe in the 1960s version of social justice, not the shabby modern iteration.

What I wrote a few years back about Sacramento remains as starkly true as ever:

“When times are bad, unions pressure Democrats to always make social services for the poor be the first target of budget cutting, preserving public employee compensation by any means possible.

“When times are good, they pressure Democrats to save extra revenue for them. In the revenue boom that lasted from 2003-2007, social services spending went up by barely the rate of inflation, while spending on schools (teacher unions) and prisons (guard unions) went up at least four times as fast.”

Representing just whose interests?

Is that what rank-and-file Democratic voters want?

Doubftul. Very doubtful.