CA-32: Multiple Judy Chu Endorsements in the Final Weekend

You would think you would want the endorsements before GOTV weekend, but the Judy Chu campaign rolled out a series of endorsements in the past 48 hours. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (CA-47) endorsed Dr. Chu yesterday and appeared with her at a GOTV rally. And today, Chu announced endorsements from Congresswoman Diane Watson (CA-33) and the United Farm Workers. Previously UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta had endorsed Chu, but prior to today, the UFW had endorsed Gil Cedillo, so this is a very surprising reversal.

"Judy Chu has always been a champion and friend to farm workers and working class families everywhere. When farm worker Asuncion Valdivia died after toiling in the extreme heat of the Central Valley for hours on end and was denied adequate medical care by his employers, Judy proposed legislation that would ensure such a tragedy would never happen again,” said Arturo Rodriguez, UFW President. “Today, California's workers are entitled to mandatory shade, rest, and water breaks thanks to the law Judy helped pass. It is because of her dedication to the health and well-being of our members that the United Farm Workers of America proudly endorse Judy Chu for Congress!"

Considering how late in the game it is, something has to be getting these endorsers off the fence and into Chu's column, especially with respect to the Farm Workers, who appear to have reversed their endorsement. Maybe it's Gil Cedillo's vindictive, ugly campaign.

I don't think it will matter to GOTV efforts, but it's a telling sign when the players start lining up at the very end of the game.

...Sen. Cedillo still has the UFW endorsement on his website.

Campaign Update: CA-10, CA-03, CA-47, CA-50

The Internet moves at, well, Internet speed, so parts of my House race roundup were already out of date or incomplete by the time I published it. So here's an update on a few races.

• CA-10: John Garamendi announced a significant series of national labor endorsements for the upcoming CA-10 race, despite Mark DeSaulnier having locked up the Contra Costa County Central Labor Committee endorsement and the local Building Trades (which cover almost 100 local unions) and chairing the Senate Labor Committee. They include:

AFSCME: American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
CNA: California Nurses Association
CFT: California Federation of Teachers
UFCW: United Food & Commercial Workers
CSEA: California School Employees Association
Laborers International Union of North America
International Union of Operating Engineers
CWA: Communication Workers of America

Many of those can provide PAC money, resources and support to Garamendi, leveling the playing field in a race where DeSaulnier captured all the early endorsements.

• CA-03: I passed on the rumor about Phil Angelides and CA-03 in my roundup, but local blogger Randy Bayne dismisses that report and notes that Elk Grove City Councilman Gary Davis will likely run, having met with the DCCC and begun the process of putting a team together. I don't agree with Bayne that a contested primary (Dr. Amerish Bera has also announced) would impact negatively on the race. Especially when the candidates have low name ID, a primary can increase their public profile and show them to be a "winner" in front of the district, at the end. Momentum can build. Primaries don't necessarily have to be nasty and debilitating, and I fail to understand why anyone would reject them out of hand.

Incidentally, I never took much stock in the rumor about Angelides, I simply thought it would be a decent line of inquiry, given his name ID, fundraising ability and progressive profile.

CA-47: One potential challenge to a Democratic incumbent I overlooked yesterday was Van Tran's run against Loretta Sanchez, profiled in Politico.

On the heels of an election marked by a dismal performance among Asian voters, top Republicans are aggressively recruiting California Assemblyman Van Tran, a Vietnamese-American, to challenge Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) next year.

If elected, Tran would be the second Vietnamese-American in Congress, after Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-La.), who won his seat in a 2008 election.

Tran has already been feted at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s March fundraising dinner as a guest of the committee’s recruitment chairman, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and he was encouraged to run by House Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor. He also made a trip to Washington after last November’s election to meet with officials from the NRCC.

Even Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has assisted in the recruitment process, meeting with Tran and offering support for any potential candidacy. Tran was an outspoken backer of McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and helped him carry Orange County over Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary.

What the story fails to mention is that, not only does Tran not have full support among the Vietnamese community in the district, not only does Loretta Sanchez have experience easily defeating Vietnamese challengers, but Tran didn't even do that well in his own Assembly race last year, winning over 55% of the vote against Ken Arnold. If Tran is one of the Republicans' top recruits, they're in even bigger trouble than I thought. Incidentally, Sanchez' voting record has greatly improved over the past couple years.

• CA-50: I should have cited Francine Busby's Firedoglake chat from a couple weeks ago. I don't think I agree with her on this, though:

I’ve alway said that the Latino voters have to organize register and educate from within their own community. I see more activism and organizing going on than I did before. In fact, I will be attending a meeting on Monday of the reconstituted Latino American Democratic Club in Oceanside. We may have a strong Latina running for a state office who can rally the base. Also, Bilbray is their worst nightmare, so I expect that to motivate them to get out to vote. I reach out to leaders in the community as much as possible to maintain good communications and understanding.

Outreach consists of more than "hopefully they'll self-organize." You need to actually engage the Latino community instead of hoping some other local candidate can do it for you. Not a good sign.

Hunter: Illegal Immigrants Doing The Voting Americans Won't Do!

Duncan Hunter, last seen falling behind Alan Keyes in Iowa, despite Keyes being on the campaign trail all of two weeks, is trying to push his way back into the GOP nomination by jumping on the anti-brown people bandwagon. He's now claiming that illegal aliens vote routinely in California, conveniently without any evidence whatsoever. The quote, made in the recent Republican debate on African-American issues in Baltimore, was: "We have right now a real danger of people that are illegally in the country being rounded up, herded into the polls, we've seen that in California, voting illegally. That disenfranchises everybody in that community." Brad Friedman of BradBlog, after getting no response from the Hunter campaign backing up his charges, thinks he knows what Hunter is talking about, making him more of a genius than I am.

Our best guess as to what Hunter imagines he was referring to was the contested House election in California's 46th district between Loretta Sanchez (D) and Bob Dornan (R) in 1996. Sanchez was ultimately declared the winner by less than 1000 votes. Dornan then contested the election, alleging thousands of illegal votes by non-citizens.

Actual evidence, as opposed to wild, unsupported allegations by Republicanist media outlets is difficult to come by. But what happened in that race --- after a lot of Googling and even purchased articles from newspaper archives, far more research than we suspect Hunter ever did before making his unfounded accusations in a Presidential Debate --- seems to be this:

Sketchy evidence from 14 months of county, state, and federal investigations suggests that there were some non-citizens who may have voted in the election, though not enough to change the election results even if they did. They did so without the intent of knowingly violating the law. Most of the allegations had to do with an Hispanic group that had registered immigrants to vote as they were preparing to become U.S. citizens. Most of those registrants had, in fact, become citizens by the time they actually voted.

Dornan contested the election under the Federal Contested Elections Act. The challenge was eventually dismissed in a lopsided 378 to 33 vote in the Republican majority-led U.S. House in 1998. That vote came on the heels of an 8 to 1 recommendation by the Republican majority-led House Oversight Committee, after a Republican majority-led task force, comprised of Republicans Bob Ney (now-jailed) and Vernon Ehlers (now ranking member of the House Admin Comm. who replaced Ney when he went to jail) and Democrat Steny Hoyer (now House Majority leader) ran an 18-month investigation into the allegations.

At the state level, the D.A. in heavily Republican Orange County and Republican Secretary of State Bill Jones both investigated the matter as well. Both state investigations ultimately decided against bringing any voter fraud indictments. Both were unable to prove that anyone had the intent of voting illegally, deciding instead that the voters in question "had registered in error and not from criminal intent," according to Lorraine Minnite's 1993 Demos report on "Securing the Vote: an analysis of Election Fraud" [PDF, see pages 40 to 42].

All told, according to Minnite, some $1.4 million in tax-payer dollars was spent in the state, county, and federal investigations. Nobody was ever charged with voter fraud.

This is one of those wingnut zombie lies that refuses to die. They make them with impunity because virtually nobody in the traditional media ever calls them on it. But they are willfully, insistently, knowingly wrong.

Loretta Sanchez And The Defense Machine Hustle

As usual, it would be better to quote this Digby post verbatim, but let me just give you the relevant section from the article in question:

(Loretta) Sanchez, Orange County's only Democratic member of Congress, voted in 2002 against giving President Bush authorization to invade Iraq. More recently she voted to begin pulling troops out within 90 days.

Tuesday night Sanchez said she could not support the protesters (who want to cut funding for the war) because the $145 billion in Iraq war funding was in the same bill that would provide money to build the C-17 aircraft in California.

"I never voted for this war," she said. But "I'm not going to vote against $2.1 billion for C-17 production, which is in California. That is just not going to happen."

Sanchez has been consistently against the war, and she cannot be fully blamed for protecting her constituents. But she's constrained by the fact that a major military contractor in her district has a gun to her head. Particularly in California, but all over the country really, the massing of the war machine has a definite impact on policy. They put their factories in all these different districts, so that shuttering an obsolete weapons system will be met with enormous resistance. This ensures that you can never decrease military spending or even keep it the same. And eventually, all these systems have to be justified. Through war.

This is approximately why the nightly news has all of these ads for Lockheed Martin and Boeing on them. I can't buy a 757, but Boeing can keep that news network in line by threatening to drop their ads if they stray from the party line.

Here's Digby:

It's just another way that big money distorts our politics. Sanchez's statement makes it quite clear that the "power of the purse" is not about stopping anything. It's about funding all kinds of things that have been set up over many years to keep politicians like Sanchez in line. She really does have to answer to her constituents --- many of whom make their living off the military industrial complex dime. You can't blame her.

I don't even think public financing will stop this. You're talking about thousands of constituents' jobs. And California embodies this problem as much as any state in the union. It's something we really have to think about. How do we, after 60 years of massive military buildup, put this genie back in the bottle?

(This isn't limited to defense, by the way, John Dingell's attempt to upend CAFE standard legislation preferred by the Speaker comes from him protecting his constituents, just as resistance to gas taxes comes from legislators protecting theirs.)