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OCTOBER 3, 2023

On the Prospect website

* David Dayen on today's Supreme Court arguments over CFPB funding

* Bob Kuttner on Big Tech's war against European regulation

* Ramenda Cyrus on North Carolina GOP legislators' new law

enabling them to hide their doings from their voters

* David Dayen on the mystery of overpriced meat

Meyerson on TAP

Newsom's Choice

In California (not to mention America), the racial and ethnic politics
of representation are inescapable.

Any biographer of California Gov. Gavin Newsom is sure to focus on
Newsom's unanticipated power to appoint a host of figures to the
state's most important elected positions. That biographer will surely
also note that this has repeatedly plunged Newsom into the middle of the
state's racial and ethnic rivalries.

In 2020, with the accession of Sen. Kamala Harris (a Black woman) to the
vice presidency, Newsom appointed the state's secretary of state, Alex
Padilla (a Latino), to the Senate, to which Padilla was subsequently
elected. He then appointed veteran State Assembly member Shirley Weber
(also a Black woman) to be Padilla's successor as secretary of state,
a post to which she was also subsequently elected. The following year,
when state Attorney General Xavier Becerra (a Latino) joined the Biden
administration as secretary of health and human services, Newsom
appointed longtime Assembly member Rob Bonta (of Filipino descent) to
take Becerra's place as AG, to which Bonta later also won election.

Newsom's appointment of Padilla to succeed Harris marked the first
time a Latino had represented California in the U.S. Senate. It rankled
some in the African American community, however, as Harris had been the
only Black woman in the Senate. As a way of placating his critics,
Newsom then pledged that if the other Senate seat (Dianne Feinstein's)
were to come open on his watch, he'd be sure to appoint a Black woman
as Feinstein's successor.

Newsom needed no help understanding that as California governor in the
early 21st century, he was inescapably in the crosshairs of
long-standing rivalries over racial representation. Politically, over
the past half-century, the state, not to mention Newsom's own
Democratic Party, has gone from white-majority/Black-minority to one
where whites and Latinos share demographic majority status, with the
rapidly growing Asian American community constituting the third-largest
racial group, and Blacks, once the minority anchor of the state's
Democratic Party, now coming in a distant fourth.

The state's current racial breakdown is 40 percent Latino, 35 percent
white, 17 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and 6 percent Black. That
bears scant resemblance to the California of 40 years ago. In 1980,
according to the federal census, California was 67 percent non-Hispanic
white, 19 percent Latino, and 8 percent Black. The Census Bureau
didn't even ask about Asian Americans then.

When it came to political representation, though, California Blacks made
the most of their numbers from the '60s through the '90s. Because
they still largely resided in the distinct areas of major cities to
which they'd been confined by residential segregation decades earlier,
they constituted the majorities in some contiguous inner-city Los
Angeles congressional and legislative districts, and were also a
sizable, though not majority, community in the East Bay areas around
Oakland. They'd long elected distinguished progressive legislators in
those districts, beginning, in Los Angeles, with Gus Hawkins, who was
first elected on socialist Upton Sinclair's "End Poverty in
California" Democratic Party slate to the legislature in 1934 and who
went on to a notable congressional career from 1962 to 1991. (He was
succeeded by Maxine Waters.) In 1970, African American Ron Dellums,
running on a left-wing anti-war platform, ousted white incumbent Rep.
Jeffery Cohelan in the Democratic primary to represent the East Bay in
Congress, in a race that turned much more on ideology than it did on
race. Dellums went on to represent that district in Congress through
1998. During that time, Dellums was also a member of the Democratic
Socialist Organizing Committee and then DSA-for much of his tenure,
the only avowed socialist in Congress. (He was succeeded by his former
chief of staff, Barbara Lee.)

We Depend on Your Donations

Please note that in that 1980 census, California was home to more than
twice as many Latinos as Blacks, but Latinos held far fewer elective
offices, partly because they were not at the time as clustered
residentially as Blacks, and in general had lower levels of political
activism than the Black community had developed in its centuries-long
battle for equal rights. For a time, Black and white liberal alliances
dominated the state's Democratic Party (in the Bay Area, Black and
white

**left**alliances). In 1973, a coalition of Black and Jewish voters
elected Tom Bradley as mayor of Los Angeles (a post he held for 20
years)-the first Black person to govern a major American city in which
Blacks did not constitute a majority of the population. In 1981, the
Democratic majority in the State Assembly elected Willie Brown, a Black
member from San Francisco, to be Speaker, a post he held for 14 years.
Brown later went on to be San Francisco's mayor, though in San
Francisco, as in L.A., Blacks constituted a small share of the
population.

But as the state's Latino population began to balloon beginning with
the migration from war-torn Central America in the '80s and
NAFTA-impoverished rural Mexico in the '90s, Latinos did begin to win
legislative offices, and, as a matter of economic necessity, to move
into working-class and poorer neighborhoods, some of which in Los
Angeles were both historically and currently Black. The decennial
drawing of district lines in L.A. has sometimes been marked by a
Black-Latino

**modus vivendi**-and sometimes not.

In the 1990s, there were regular contests over whether the
superintendent of the L.A. Unified School District (a post that no one
held for very long) should be Black or Latino. Last year's release of
a recording in which some Latino elected officials spoke disgustingly
about Blacks occurred in the context of a discussion of how Latinos held
just three of L.A.'s 15 city council seats-the same number that
Blacks held-even though the city's Latino residents outnumbered the
city's Black residents by a 6-to-1 ratio. Maxine Waters continues to
represent those parts of Los Angeles that were once the heart of
L.A.'s Black community, but today, her district is heavily Latino. No
one has sought to dislodge Waters, who ably represents her working-class
constituents across all racial lines. But when she does decide to step
down, no redrawing of lines can create a majority-Black district on a
terrain that's been represented by Blacks since 1934.

Hence Newsom's conundrum, as a numerically ascendant part of his
political universe and a numerically shrinking part have come into
conflict. Many Latino activists are frustrated at what they see as their
underrepresentation in public office, particularly at the highest levels
of government, while many Blacks fear that Latino advances may come at
their (Blacks') expense, a fear exacerbated by the fact that Black
advances have come disproportionately from the power of their (and their
allies') political mobilizations.

That's what informed Newsom's decision to appoint Padilla to succeed
Harris in the Senate, and to appoint Laphonza Butler to succeed
Feinstein. To appoint Barbara Lee, he rightly concluded, would have been
seen as intervening in the upcoming choice voters will make next year
when they select their new senator.

Just as the big-city Eastern machine bosses of yore sometimes sought to
create election slates with a requisite balance of Irish, Italian,
Jewish, and Black candidates, so Newsom has found himself enmeshed in
kindred calculations over the series of appointments he's had to make.
All politics may or may not be local, but in America, at the level of
representation, for better and worse, they're almost always ethnic.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

[link removed]

Supreme Court Seems Hesitant to Toss Out the CFPB

Oral arguments today saw the justices skeptical that the Constitution
doesn't allow Congress to fund the CFPB in a particular fashion. BY
DAVID DAYEN

The EU's Tough New Rules for Tech

Will they survive an intense and preposterous lobbying campaign by the
U.S. platform giants to brand them as discriminatory against American
companies? BY ROBERT KUTTNER

North Carolina Shuts Government Off From the People

A change to public records laws, which takes effect today, allows
legislators full discretion to retain, sell, or destroy their own
documents. BY RAMENDA CYRUS

Lawsuit Highlights Why Meat Has Been Overpriced for 40 Years

Agri Stats lets meat processors coordinate their pricing. The Justice
Department finally decided to go after what it calls collusion. BY DAVID
DAYEN

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