Right-winger David Harmer appears to have been shamed by Brian’s post yesterday – after telling reporters all week he would not concede the CA-11 race to Jerry McNerney despite the final count showing him behind, Harmer is finally conceding:

GOP Congressional candidate David Harmer has officially conceded his East Bay race to Democratic incumbent Jerry McNerney.

Harmer confirmed the news Friday night in a text to The Chronicle — which we’re touched to say that Dave sent from a screening of “Tangled” he was attending with his kids. Wow. I think he just won a Chronnie for that move. Best Way/Place to Reveal a Concession.

“Called & congratulated him this afternoon,” Harmer texted The Chronicle. “Don’t intend to contest results. Will issue statement tomorrow. In movie now w/kids.”

It’s nice to see a California Republican finally admit reality for change. Harmer and his fellow Republicans believed they had a chance to take out McNerney, but couldn’t do it even in a wave election year.

Of course, as we’ve been explaining here at Calitics, the California Republican Party exempted themselves from that wave. Because of their right-wing extremism – Harmer, after all, called for the abolition of public schools – the CRP has made itself unelectable in this state. True, they will win some legislative and Congressional elections, as well as local races, from time to time, but the overall trend is against them, as Harmer has learned.

Jerry McNerney has become quite a disappointment after being propelled to victory in 2006 by a wave of progressive activism. Just this week he joined Republicans to oppose the middle-class tax cut because it did not include extensions of the cuts for the rich. To be sure, McNerney has also voted along with the rest of the Democratic caucus in support of things like health care reform and the stimulus, so he’s certainly not on the right.

But McNerney is a good example of my point that California politics is being realigned to exclude the right and instead be oriented around a battle between those on the left and those who swear fealty to a corporate agenda. Depending on how McNerney’s district looks after redistricting, he should be a prime target for a progressive challenge in 2012.

We’ve been discussing the implications of the decline and fall of the California Republican Party here at Calitics in recent days – they have made themselves unelectable because their base hates 21st century reality, demanding white supremacy and destruction of the public sector despite the fact that a diverse population wants neither. Because of this, the CA GOP will struggle to win statewide elections, leading the corporate elite to bypass the GOP and forcing progressives to step up and ensure that Democratic majorities deliver for the base.

The most likely outcome of this is a state politics that looks like SF or LA, where statewide elections are contested between the left and a pro-corporate center, with the right-wing at the fringes of statewide politics, winning some races at the local and legislative/Congressional level but nothing more.

So how is the right-wing going to deal with their impending marginalization? By coming back to reality, embracing the diversity of 21st century California and the public’s desire to have strong public services?

Heh, no, don’t be ridiculous. Instead they plan to construct a 21st century Jim Crow, stemming the demographic tide that is swamping their movement by undermining the Constitution:

As one of its first acts, the new Congress will consider denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants who are born in the United States.

…The idea has a growing list of supporters, including Republican Reps. Tom McClintock of Elk Grove and Dan Lungren of Gold River, but it has aroused intense opposition, as well.

This is a straightforward violation of the 14th Amendment, which explicitly states that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. These right-wingers are claiming they can violate the Constitution because, somehow, children born to undocumented immigrants aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US. I’m guessing that means McClintock and Lungren also believe that the undocumented aren’t subject to other federal laws, including deportation?

The attack on the 14th Amendment is motivated by a desire to prevent more Latinos from becoming citizens, and therefore give the California right a chance at avoiding permanent marginalization. It’s especially offensive when you realize why the 14th Amendment was enacted in the first place.

At the end of the Civil War, with the abolition of slavery, the Democratic Party in the South sought to cling to power by preventing the African-American population from exercising their right to vote – where that right was exercised, Republicans were elected to govern Southern states. So Democrats struck back with laws declaring the ex-slaves to not be US citizens, and therefore ineligible to vote or enjoy other legal protections.

The US Congress, controlled by the Republicans, were outraged at this and passed a Civil Rights Act in 1866 to forbid these practices, including protections for birthright citizenship, ensuring the ex-slaves and their descendants would be citizens and preventing a second-class status from being conferred on Southern blacks. Concerned that the Supreme Court might overturn this, the Congress wrote it into the Constitution as the 14th Amendment.

So California Republicans – along with their right-wing allies around the country – want to undermine a core element of American Civil Rights in order to implement the Jim Crow policies that protect their power that the 14th Amendment was designed to prevent. The target this time is Latinos and not African Americans, but the overall intent is the same – make elections safe for the right.

And they wonder why they can’t get elected in California any longer.

Would Meg Whitman have won if she ran as an independent candidate?

That’s the question that comes to mind after reflecting on the collapse of the California Republican Party. With a base that refuses to accept 21st century reality and demands fealty to an agenda of white supremacy and feudal economics, Republican candidates are going to struggle to win statewide elections in a state where a clear majority of the population has rejected that base’s extremism.

In turn, that means Republican statewide candidates will always face the dilemma that helped bring down Whitman – they cannot please the right-wing base and have any chance at winning a statewide election. Whitman had to appease her base’s hatred of Latinos, and as a result lost the election by 13 points.

But what if Whitman didn’t have to run as a Republican? What if she spent her money to get herself on the ballot as an independent candidate? Whitman would have been free of the need to appease the right-wing base, and could have made a credible bid to win Latinos and other Californians who refuse to support the Republican agenda.

This thought experiment can only go so far, of course. Whitman didn’t just attack Latinos and threaten to destroy the state’s public services because it was necessary to win a GOP primary – it’s what she actually believed. Even as an independent candidate, Whitman’s same personal and political flaws would have enabled Jerry Brown to win – especially if Whitman bled votes to an actual Republican candidate. So an independent candidacy would, on its own, not have meaningfully changed things.

But what about the top-two primary?

That’s where things get interesting – and worrisome. It would not be difficult for corporate elites to back statewide candidates who run as independents in a top-two primary. These would be candidates in the mold of Michael Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Britain’s David Cameron – accepting the social liberalism of the electorate (rejecting the religious right, the anti-Latino right, and the anti-gay right) while espousing right-wing, neoliberal, corporate-friendly economic policies.

With enough money behind them, it is possible that such a candidate could place in the top two in the primary, alongside a Democrat, and pose a formidable challenge in a general election. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed how such a candidate could win in an election without party primaries (the 2003 recall). It’s a new party – the Corporate Party – that you don’t want to see.

At the same time, this effort would encounter some significant obstacles. Voters showed that they really don’t like wealthy self-funders, and are tiring of right-wing economic policies that undermine the public sector basis of prosperity.

Additionally, there really isn’t any electoral base for this kind of candidate – California’s electorate is divided into a large progressive bloc, a sizable right-wing bloc, and a very small number of people who aren’t solidly in either one, but who nevertheless gravitate toward one or the other. Wealth alone can’t cobble together a coalition that can give an independent corporate candidate a second-place showing in the primary.

Still, this represents the best, and perhaps only, hope for the corporate elite here in California. With an unelectable Republican Party, gaming the top-two primary gives them a shot at blocking Democrats from governing California.

Of course, Democrats themselves have work to do – namely, laying out a progressive agenda and vision for California that can consolidate Democratic victories. But that’s the topic for tomorrow’s post.

A bill like Arizona’s odious, anti-immigrant SB 1070 could never make it out of committee in the California Legislature, and would never be signed by Governor Jerry Brown (or Arnold Schwarzenegger for that matter) even if it did.

That leaves the ballot, and that’s what one right-winger plans to do:

A Republican activist from Belmont is raising signatures to place an Arizona-style immigration law on the California ballot in 2012.

The proposition would require all state and local police officers to investigate the immigration status of people they stop if they have reasonable suspicion the person is in the country illegally. It would make it a state crime for illegal immigrants to seek work while concealing their immigration status. And it would make it a state crime for an employer to hire an undocumented immigrant, whether the hiring happens intentionally or negligently.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced Tuesday that the proponent, Michael Erickson, could begin collecting signatures. He must collect the signatures of 433,971 voters by April 21 in order for the initiative to qualify for the 2012 ballot….

Erickson said he took the text of Arizona’s law, SB 1070, and applied it to California’s penal code, and also strengthened the language to overcome likely constitutional challenges.

Here we go again. As we learned in 1994 with Prop 187, 1996 with Prop 209, and in 2008 with Prop 8, the ballot box is not the best place to protect rights. Prop 187 passed by a 2-1 margin in ’94. I worry about what would happen if this got on a CA ballot.

Especially if that ballot were the February 2012 presidential primary ballot. My understanding is that if this initiative qualifies by April 21, 2011, it would indeed be on that ballot.

That’s a big problem. The February 2012 primary will have a massively Republican electorate – President Obama is likely to not face serious opposition for renomination, whereas the right will be having quite a spirited contest to determine who in their rogue’s gallery will get sent against Obama in the fall. Of all the ballots that I would NOT want to see this initiative on, it would be that ballot. I might support a serious primary challenger to Obama only for the sake of driving Democrats to the polls to try and stop this initiative should it qualify.

So far there’s no indication that any money is behind this initiative, but that could change at any moment. As I explained yesterday, the base of the California Republican Party hates Latinos and desperately wants to strike out at them using this sort of neo-Jim Crow tool. All it would take is a little money to get the teabaggers fired up and gather the signatures, and this could go from a concern to a very serious and immediate threat.

We’re going to watch this one very, very, very closely.

In 2009, California’s Right to Know Act became law – a bill that required doctors and care providers – particularly hospice – to inform their terminally ill patients about ways to relieve any pain they might be suffering.

Later that same year, a young mother from Los Gatos in the care of Vitas Hospice, one of the state’s largest hospice providers, suffered a very painful death from cancer. Michelle Hargett-Beebee died at the age of 43, without Vitas ever telling her or her family that she did not have to suffer in pain. They never gave her a chance to have her pain relieved.

As a result, Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit that exists to help people make fair and reasonable end-of-life choices, filed suit against Vitas last week charging that Vitas broke the law:

Her final weeks were underscored by terrible and almost continuous pain.  Michelle was never told about her pain-management options, despite receiving care in California, where the California Right to Know End-of-Life Options Act requires health care providers to inform terminal patients, upon request, of all their end-of-life options.

Michelle’s parents were at her side advocating strongly for optimal care and pain management. Despite their advocacy and a state law designed to help patients make informed choices, she was never told that medications were available to her that would have eased her acute pain.

The issue here is whether Vitas broke the law in not offering “palliative sedation” as an option. Here’s what C&C says about “palliative sedation”:

What is “palliative sedation”? According to The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), palliative sedation is the use of sedative medications to relieve extreme suffering by making the patient unaware and unconscious (as in a deep sleep) while the disease takes its course, eventually leading to death. The sedative medication is gradually increased until the patient is comfortable and able to relax. Palliative sedation is not intended to cause death or shorten life.

In this case, it’s not actually a form of physician-assisted suicide (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And California law makes clear that this is one of the “end-of-life options” that terminally ill Californians have the right to know about from their doctors or caregivers.

Why does this matter? Californians should have the right to make their own choices about their treatment. Corporate policies should never, ever trump the ability of people to be able to relieve their own pain – or relieve that of a dying, suffering loved one.

Because the law is so new, not all Californians know about it – especially if big corporate caregivers aren’t sharing that info. Whatever the outcome of this case, more Californians ought to learn about the Right to Know Act and ensure that they take charge of the conditions and terms of their own final days.

Brian mentioned this in last night’s open thread, so I thought I’d crosspost it from the California High Speed Rail Blog.

Jerry Lewis, a Republican Congressman from Southern California (Redlands, to be specific), is leading his party’s efforts to use their majority to embarrass and frustrate President Barack Obama’s efforts at economic recovery by proposing a bill to take back all unspent stimulus funds – including California’s $2 billion in high speed rail money:

Wasting no time after a victorious midterm election, GOP Congressional leaders who promised to slash spending are looking to make an example out of the nation’s priciest public works project: California’s $43 billion high-speed railroad.

A coalition of 27 House Republicans, led by the ranking member of the committee that controls spending, wants to yank $2 billion in stimulus funds promised to California to kick start the massive project.

U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, last week introduced the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Rescission Act,” which would return the final $12 billion in unspent and uncommitted stimulus funds to the U.S. Treasury to help fight the $1.3 trillion U.S. deficit.

About half the remaining stimulus money is set aside for planned high-speed rail projects. The largest is in California, which has spent nearly $200 million of its $2.25 billion award on planning but is saving the rest for construction.

It’s worth noting that if nothing is done – if this bill dies and no other bill undermining stimulus funding is approved – then the status quo remains. Congress has already authorized this money to be spent, so the Executive Branch can award the funds and deliver them from the US Treasury to the state of California.

Is this a serious threat to the HSR project? Hard to tell. It’s difficult to imagine this getting through the US Senate or getting the president’s signature. Unfortunately, Democrats have also become adept at making “compromises” to appease the right in the rather odd belief that doing so would help Democratic fortunes, so we can’t rule this out entirely.

On the other hand, Republicans are making noise about using the spring vote on raising the country’s debt ceiling to force massive spending cuts. That would be the moment when I could envision Obama caving to the Republicans. He has made a big show of his support for high speed rail, but if Republicans are forcing him to choose between a national debt default and cutting back his HSR program, well, I’m not convinced Obama would call the Republicans’ bluff.

It should be obvious that cutting these funds would be an insanely reckless thing to do – but that’s the House Republican Caucus for you. They’ve totally abandoned any effort to provide economic recovery or build new infrastructure, and are determined to shackle this country to its cars in order to enrich their oil company friends.

The best way to stop this from happening is to take action. We’re going to be doing that as soon as we can. Californians will need to speak up loudly to ensure that our Senators and the president don’t cave in to these ludicrous and reckless Republican demands.

If you’ve been reading Calitics for any length of time, you’d have learned long ago that the California Republican Party is unelectable in statewide races. When we started calling them the Zombie Death Cult in 2009, it was because we realized the party was a dead party walking, made up of a small group of ideologues who are determined to lead this state off a cliff. Earlier this year I started a new moniker for the CRP, noting that they had become a white man’s party. It is a party whose base hates Latinos, does not believe women deserve basic rights to control their own bodies, and wants to treat LGBT Californians like second-class citizens. That is not a party that is electable in this state, and the Democrats’ dominance of statewide elections since 1996 merely reinforces the point.

In short, you get the news first at Calitics, and then it shows up in places like the Los Angeles Times:

The road to redemption for the Republican Party in California may be even rougher than November’s statewide electoral drubbing indicated, as a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows a deep reluctance among many voters to side with a GOP candidate and broad swaths of the state holding views on government’s role that conflict with Republican tenets….

Strikingly, almost one in five California voters said they would never cast a ballot for a Republican. Among Latinos, that rose to almost one in three. Only 5% of California voters were as emphatically anti-Democrat.

These numbers are simply damning. In a year where Republicans did pretty well across the country, they ran into a Blue Wall at the Sierra Nevada. They have lost every single statewide office, and failed to pick up a single Congressional or legislative seat.

They even lost another Assembly seat, and this too tells the story of why the Zombie Death Cult is doomed. In AD-5, a suburban Sacramento district, Dr. Richard Pan dispatched Andy Pugno, the author of Proposition 8, showing that social conservatism costs Republicans elections. What clearer evidence do you need of the fact that the CRP is in deep trouble?

Well, the LA Times has marshaled quite a lot of additional evidence. The LAT/USC poll that drove the LAT’s article is full of devastating results for Republicans:

When asked whether government regulation of businesses protected the public or caused more harm than good, Californians defended regulation by a 15-point margin. When asked whether government protection of minorities was important or fostered societal divisions, government protection won, 52% to 35%. When asked whether government should help the poor, or whether that encouraged dependence, Californians backed government help, 49% to 39%.

And as bad as things are now for the Zombie Death Cult, they’re about to get far worse:

As troubling as those numbers were from a conservative perspective, the poll suggested that Republicans face worse problems ahead. Among voters under age 30, same-sex marriage was backed by 64%, 15 points higher than among votes overall. Younger voters’ support for immigration reform was 10 points higher than overall. They and Latinos defended government activism more strongly than voters overall.

Ideologically, 42% of those under age 30 described themselves as liberal, whereas only 20% of those age 65 and above did. Only 28% of Latino voters and 36% of nonpartisan voters were over age 50, compared with 52% of white voters and 51% of Republicans.

In short, California Republicans are fucked. Their base demands fealty to an agenda of white supremacy and anti-government ideology that the majority of Californians simply do not want. Meg Whitman spent $140 million to learn that it is not possible to appease the right-wing base AND win a statewide election, because the right-wing base hates the Latino voters who now decide the outcome of elections in California. And younger Californians, who are seeing their future evaporate thanks to right-wing policies, are simply becoming more deeply entrenched in their progressive values.

Some Republicans are hoping that the combination of the redistricting commission and the top-two primary will reverse the trend. Not only will they be disappointed, but it seems likely that both will rebound against the CRP. Redistricting is going to reduce the number of safe seats that enable people like Darrell Issa, John Campbell, Devin Nunes, and Dana Rohrabacher to spout an extremist agenda. California Republicans in the House think they’re on the verge of power, but they’re more likely to find out that being in the majority will simply further alienate them from the electorate. When people like Devin Nunes find their safe seats gone, they’re going to have a rough time getting re-elected in 2012.

The top-two primary, pushed by Abel Maldonado and Arnold Schwarzenegger in an attempt to push both parties toward a more corporate agenda, will not produce the more moderate GOP that those two hope for. In districts that will remain safely red, the basic party dynamics will still produce right-wing Republicans. The party’s money, voter mobilization, and ideological systems all conspire to favor right-wingers over moderates. In districts where the top-two candidates are Republicans and Democrats (i.e. not from the same party) the Republican will usually be a right-wing extremist. That’s been the experience with Washington State’s top-two primary, and I expect it to be repeated here.

California Democrats appear to have achieved a realignment of the party system to one with a long-term Democratic majority. It is the same opportunity President Obama had, but chose to give up in order to bail out the banks and make an extraordinarily foolish attempt to try and make deals with the Republicans. California Democrats understood that you win elections by running against right-wing extremism, instead of trying to appease it.

As long as California Democrats remain faithful to the progressive agenda of the diverse but strong coalition that has asked them to govern this state, they should have every reason to expect to sustain long-term power. If they stray from that agenda, however, they’ll open the door for a Republican return by alienating the progressive base and discrediting Democratic policies.

As a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope California Democrats use their power wisely, and ensure that the California Republican Party never takes power here again. If the Zombie Death Cult doesn’t like it, well, there’s always Texas.

UPDATE: George Skelton makes a similar point today, though he seems a bit naive about the Zombie Death Cult’s willingness to change:

Everyone who isn’t in denial knows what the California GOP must do to survive:

Drop the demagoguery about illegal immigrants because it scares off the fast-growing Latino electorate.

Mute the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-environmental rhetoric.

Focus on economic development and fiscal conservatism. There’s a natural constituency for that. Look at how Californians voted on the ballot propositions.

The party’s base will not allow the party to drop the demagoguery, the rhetoric, and the opposition to economic development. It’s not a matter of the party elites shifting the message. The CRP represents a base that is so fundamentally hostile to 21st century reality that the party cannot make those changes without changing the base. And the base will consistently veto those shifts.

On the final point Skelton makes, there’s not much hope for the CRP there either. Their party is hostile to any government action to promote economic development. On “fiscal conservatism,” California is at an impasse, but the LAT/USC poll numbers make it pretty damn clear that Californians want robust government services. They just need someone to show them how to fund it, and need a Democratic Party that’s willing to consistently make the case for such funding.

The problem with the CRP isn’t the leadership, but the base. Until that base is marginalized, Republicans will be a dead party in California.