“I remember that 187 got challenged into court and Gray Davis refused to do his job to defend it.”
Prop 187 was killed by the decision of one person, Judge Marianne Pfaelzer. When she ruled against the will of the people of California it was the duty of the Governor to appeal her decision so that it could be reviewed by the court of appeals. But this never happened. The people of California had their votes trashed and they were denied a day in court to overturn this judicial tyranny.
The appeal didn’t happen because Judge Pfaelzer sat on her ruling until Pete Wilson was due to leave office; she timed her ruling to coincide with Gray Davis taking office. It appears to me that Pfaelzer colluded with Davis, knowing that he wouldn’t appeal her ruling whereas Pete Wilson would. The timing of her decision was just too convenient for the opponents of 187. And Pfaelzer was certainly sympathetic to the opponents, with her single vote overruling the entire California electorate.
But Prop 187 didn’t have to end there. It’s my understanding that any Governor could still appeal Pfaelzer’s dictatorial ruling. Which means Schwarzenegger. But Arnold was a tool of the GOP establishment, which is why he was supported instead of Tom McClintock, and Arnold was a member of the Open Borders Treason-Lobby wing of the GOP. And he was no more going to appeal Prop 187 than Gray Davis, or Dubya, or any of the rest of the amnesty for illegals crowd that dominates both parties.
ATTN: CALIFORNIANS!
Here is an OLD article that relays just how Rubio’s chief of staff, CESAR CONDA helped to destroy Calif. Prop. 187 (and every other immigration control initiative!)
January 1995
[snips]The two-to-one vote in favor of California’s Prop. 187 is a milestone in the battle against the welfare state. It is a victory that will help reclaim individual liberty against centralized power.....What exactly did the referendum propose? It brought an end to all government subsidies to illegal aliens in California, including welfare in the form of public education and health care, except in cases of emergencies. That’s it. It was a chance, perhaps for the first time this century, for the people of a state to vote up or down on whether to keep or scrap a welfare program in its totality.
Let’s be clear: Prop. 187 did not attack immigration.
But it wasn’t just the left and the establishment that mobilized against Proposition 187. Some intellectuals, politicians, and thinktanks of the respectable right launched a frantic campaign as well. Canadian commentator David Frum and Washington neocon William Kristol joined the attacks.
And one week before the election, Cesar V. Conda of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution gathered signers for a statement opposing Prop. 187. “In our view,” the statement said, missing the point entirely, the initiative will become “a hostile crusade against all immigrants.”
He gathered signers from most of the big thinktanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The media reported that these groups had thrown their institutional weight into defeating the measure.
The antics of Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett made the Tocqueville Institution statement appear moderate, however. To media cheers, they echoed the message of their liberal allies. Put simply, they said Prop. 187 is racist. “Does anyone seriously doubt that Latino children named Rodriguez would be more likely to appear to be illegal than Anglo children named, say, Jones?”
First, they trained all their guns on the woefully underfunded, politically inexperienced grassroots activists in the Yes on 187 committee. They were called every named in the book, as the smear brigade went into overdrive. This well-funded opposition even ran radio ads claiming that 187 was backed by “white supremacists.” [the ‘they’ referred to here was Conda along with GROVER NORQUIST]
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=263