American Civil Rights Project: ACA 7 “on the wrong side of history and morality”
“Californians simply do not like race discrimination,” says Daniel Morenoff in a letter to CA Assemblymembers. But this year’s ACA 7 is yet another attempt to degrade Prop 209’s Nondiscrimination Amendment. CA voters will again reject the “racists,” writes the American Civil Rights Project Executive Director: even if they don’t, ACA 7’s discriminatory provisions are banned by the U.S. Constitution.
In 1996, California’s voters resoundingly approved Proposition 209 by almost a million votes. That measure passed the Nondiscrimination Amendment, prohibiting all discrimination by the state and any of its subdivisions on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity in public employment, public education, or contracting.
Racists, of course, weren’t happy about this development and have sought ever since to undo Prop. 209’s progress. Unfortunately for those would-be discriminators, though, Californians simply do not like race discrimination, a message they and their representatives have sent time and again over the last 3 decades.
Current ACA 7 represents yet another effort to make fetch happen. Finally conceding that [Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard] makes overt discrimination in college admissions utterly untenable, this ACA 7 would purport to understand Harvard to have no implications of any kind beyond those facts. Rather than accept that the case closed the last narrow exception to our general prohibition on governmental discrimination, this ACA 7 treats it as a one-off, and seeks to amend the California constitution to authorize all the kinds of discrimination that were clearly unconstitutional before the Supreme Court ended the exemption for admissions.
This bears repeating: even if the Nondiscrimination Amendment vanished tomorrow in its entirety, all the discrimination which the current ACA 7 seeks to authorize would remain clearly banned by the U.S. Constitution. The only thing the current ACA 7 could hope to accomplish, even if Californians suddenly retrogressed enough to pass it, would be to plant the state’s flag on the wrong side of history and morality. The state lacks the power to re-authorize the discrimination at issue.
Californians said “no” to racial discrimination in contracting and education in 1996. They said it again, louder, in 2020. All through the legislative process, last cycle, they said it again, forcing down the last ACA 7. If forced, they will repeat themselves again in rejecting this cycle’s. But the Assembly should stop harassing voters and making them repeat the clear message they’ve sent at every opportunity. There comes a time to accept reality and stop asking.
Read the whole thing here.
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