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I don’t have anything original for you this week, and that’s fine because it would be odd of me not to address the lengthy essay currently featured on Minding the Campus: Gail Heriot’s latest, “Will the California Legislature Ever Stop Trying to Overturn Proposition 209?”

The short answer to her question seems to be: no.

Despite repeated failures, state lawmakers keep attempting to overturn California’s constitutional ban on state-sponsored preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, education, and contracting. And ACA 7 is their latest attempt to carve major exceptions into it, particularly in education, and apparently, the legislature hasn’t tired of asking a question voters keep answering.

Heriot documents not only why ACA 7 is likely to fail politically, but why, even in the unlikely event it succeeded, it would almost certainly invite federal lawsuits the state cannot win and federal funding consequences it cannot afford.

Her essay also covers the reparations statutes the legislature has been advancing alongside the constitutional amendment strategy. Unable to overturn Proposition 209 directly, legislators are attempting to achieve through ancestry-based classifications what the ban forbids through race-based ones. Whether the courts will see through that distinction, as they have before, remains to be seen. (San Francisco recently approved a reparations ordinance for black residents, providing race-based education benefits.)

What makes me particularly cynical is that California, a state whose ugliest discriminatory history was directed at Asian Americans, is attempting to fashion racial preferences that favor blacks at Asian Americans’ exclusion. As Wenyuan Wu wrote in her own piece on ACA 7, “How ironic it is for a state with no history of slavery to try every other way to prolong and relive its history of racial discrimination against Chinese Americans.”

Most frustrating of all is that California is really just a microcosm of a national trend: a legislature pushing an agenda that has little to do with what its constituents actually want. Voters have rejected racial preference schemes repeatedly. Legislators have ignored them just as repeatedly. One almost has to admire the persistence, if nothing else.

See you next week, hopefully with an original piece of my own on the latest upheaval in higher education.

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