Speaking of identity politics, as I do in the adjacent post on Claudine Gay, we should note that the left never gives up. That is what occurs to me and it is the place where William McGurn begins his Wall Street Journal column “Making discrimination okay again.” In the column McGurn recounts the efforts of California Democrats to make discrimination by race legal after its apparently decisive legal defeats:

Do they ever give up? Those looking to divvy up Americans by race, that is.

In California they tried to get race preferences approved in a 2020 referendum, but voters rejected it 57.2% to 42.8%. This was a stunning rebuke, not only because the rejection came from residents of a blue state but because the losing side had outspent opponents something like 14 to 1.

In 2023 the Supreme Court weighed in with a landmark ruling that barred colleges from treating people as members of a racial group instead of as individuals—and cast constitutional doubt on all race-based preferences. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. Couldn’t be clearer, right?

Right.

But that’s not how the left sees it. Enter ACA7. If adopted by referendum, ACA7 would grant the California governor discretionary authority to make exceptions to the rule of nondiscrimination.

University of San Diego School of Law Professor (our friend) Gail Heriot had more than a little to do with the defeat of of the 2020 referendum that sought to undo California’s Prop 209. Now at InstaPundit Professor Heriot has sent up a flare seeking help opposing the Democrats’ efforts to “gut Prop 209,” as she puts it:

Mercifully, it still won’t cost you a nickel. (If this turkey of a bill makes it to the ballot, I will start asking for money then, but we stand a decent chance of stopping it in the California Senate on a shoestring budget.)

Our “NO on ACA7” PETITION needs at least 25,000 signatures to get noticed. And we’re probably going to need a lot more. Fortunately, we have a while. [December 26 was] our first earnest day of collecting them. You don’t need to be a Californian to sign. (But if you are a Californian, please be sure to include your zip code. In the past, some legislators have asked us for the number of signers from their district’s zip codes.)

If you can also share the petition with your friends or via social media that would be terrific.

For those of you you haven’t been following this, Prop 209 amended the state constitution in 1996 with these words: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin ….” California’s deep-blue legislature has been gunning for it since. They tried to get the voters to repeal it three years ago with Prop 16. But Californians stunned them by overwhelmingly voting to keep it. It was a real David and Goliath moment; we won despite being outspent more than 14 to 1.

It’s surprising to me that they are trying again so soon after that defeat. But I guess I should have seen it coming. The report of the California Task Force on Reparations, which was released earlier this year, called for Prop 209 to be gutted. It stands in the way of their proposals. Right on schedule, the Assembly voted for ACA7.

The new effort is trickier. Instead of attempting an outright repeal, it creates a procedure under the governor can make “exceptions.” All Gov. Newsom (and future governors) will need is to be able to point to (or create) “research” showing that preferential treatment would be a good thing. But in a world in which “scholarly” research tells us that men are women and women are men, that limitation is not worth a red cent.

Professor Heriot is the coeditor with her UCSD School of Law colleague Maimon Schwarzschild of the outstanding compilation A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education (published by Encounter Books in 2021). The book is still timely despite the Supreme Court nixing the practice last year — the left never gives up.

Professor Heriot seeks your help in discouraging California Democrats from doing what they shouldn’t oughtta do by signing off on the petition (linked above and here). And here is the related No on ACA7 web site.