OAKLAND, Calif. — Stunned by an unexpected uprising within their party’s minority base, Democratic lawmakers on Monday dropped a push to reverse California’s 16-year-old ban on affirmative action in college admissions.
Constitutional Amendment 5 which would have put the issue before voters cleared the state Senate in late January on a party-line vote. But as word of the bill spread, so did resistance, mostly from families concerned that race-conscious admission policies would unfairly disadvantage Asian applicants to the intensely competitive University of California system and its flagship campuses, Berkeley and UCLA.
The strong opposition and quick success of a relatively small and reliably Democratic ethnic group 14 percent of the state’s population in 2012 revealed a new political strength.
The bill’s rapid demise culminated with an about-face by three Asian-American senators who voted for the bill in January. And its author, Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, is making no promises about its revival.
“I’d like to bring it back,” Hernandez said in a phone interview. “I believe in it. I believe we need to make sure there’s equal opportunity for everyone in the state of California.”
Republicans won’t go along with that, their state Senate leader said Monday. “Republicans will continue to oppose this measure in any way, shape or form,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar.
Black, Latino and Native American students made up almost 54 percent of California’s high school graduates in 2012 but just 27 percent of all freshmen, UC-wide, and 16 percent of UC Berkeley’s freshmen class that year.
Few issues are as personal to voters as education, which explains the intense negative reaction some had to the bill, said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy analysis group at Stanford University.
“This was remarkably bad politics on the Democrats’ part,” Whalen said. “I can think of few things more destructive than pitting one constituency of a party against another.”
- MCT Campus