Louis Warren once again helps us understand the historical roots of California’s current crisis. Thanks, Louis.
California’s crisis is such that the number one manufacturing and farming state is unable to sell its bonds. As I explained in my last post, this condition stems in part from constitutional requirements of the supermajority.
Some commentators on the right prefer a different explanation. This is the useful canard that California is congenitally left, and that liberal policies lead inevitably to financial collapse.
To be sure, the left is not blameless in this debacle. But much of California’s political upheaval of the last decade and a half has been driven by the collapse of the state’s once-formidable Republican Party. Alarmingly, national Republicans now seem to follow their lead. Progressives may think this cause for celebration – – but if the Republican Party in the U.S. becomes what it is in California, America has some hard days ahead.
To absorb the lessons that California provides, we first must understand that California was once, not so long ago, a Republican stronghold. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the tax revolt all came from here. There were eighteen governors of California in the twentieth century, and fourteen were Republicans. California saw 25 presidential contests between 1896 and 1996, and Republicans won 15 of them, including every presidential race between 1952 and 1988 except for 1964 (the year almost every state went for Lyndon Johnson).
California had a powerful, even dominant Republican Party just twenty years ago. What happened?
The watershed year that ended GOP fortunes was 1994, but the stage was actually set four years earlier, in 1990. That was the year a Republican, Pete Wilson, handily defeated Dianne Feinstein for the governorship. A so-called “moderate” Republican, Wilson took a page from a predecessor, Ronald Reagan, to sign on to what was then the biggest tax increase in California history to balance a budget reeling from the decline of defense spending at the end of the Cold War.
Indeed, the state’s condition was dire. The nation remembers the recession of the early 1990s as a mild one, but in California it was the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Huge defense companies such as General Dynamics, Raytheon and others laid off hundreds of thousands of engineers and other white collar workers. Housing values fell far from their 1980s peak, and many new homeowners soon held mortgages greater than their property values. The poor endured steep service cuts and high unemployment. In 1992, in the aftermath of the verdict exonerating the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, the city of Los Angeles exploded in the biggest civil insurrection since the Civil War.
So as 1994 approached, Wilson’s re-election was in trouble. His tax increase had balanced the budget, but Republicans were furious at their own governor for agreeing to it, and the economy seemed stuck in a death spiral. Wilson was a Marine Corps veteran with a “law and order” reputation, and the 1992 riots seemed symptomatic of his failing administration. His poll numbers were atrocious, with some surveys putting him twenty points behind the Democratic nominee, state treasurer Kathleen Brown (daughter and sister, respectively of Pat and Jerry Brown, the state’s most famous Democratic governors).
Perhaps it is not surprising that the state which produced the first two presidential candidates to ride the Southern Strategy to victory (Nixon and Reagan) would now produce a governor who created the southern border strategy. The social context for this maneuver was the state’s rapidly expanding Latino population. In 1960, most of California’s immigrants were from Canada or Europe, and the number one immigrant language was English. Even as late as 1970, California was less than 12% Hispanic. But upheaval in Mexico’s economy and particularly the collapse of the peso in 1982 drove millions of immigrants north, where legally and illegally they crossed into the U.S. By 1990, California’s population was 25% Hispanic. The large number of Mexican immigrants helped insure that by about 1994, roughly one in three of all foreign born people in the U.S. lived in southern California – – and the largest proportion of these was Mexican.
California’s racial animosities often flare in bad times. The Panic of 1873 occasioned anti-Chinese riots so vast that authorities worried about a revolution. The Great Depression fueled fierce anti-Okie and anti-Mexican political policies and vigilantism. The recession of the early ‘90s was about to produce a virulent anti-Mexican hysteria – -and Pete Wilson would turn it to his advantage.
In the summer of 1994, faced with a rapidly growing Mexican immigrant population and the worst economy in memory, many Anglo Californians suspected all Latinos were illegal immigrants and blamed them for the state’s hard times. The primary expression of their fury was Proposition 187. Introduced by Republican Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy, the initiative sought to deny public services to illegal immigrants (which by the 1990s was code for Mexicans). Any suspect person would have to prove they were a legal resident in order to remain in a public school, receive medical care, welfare, or virtually any other non-emergency service.
Staring defeat in the eye, Pete Wilson showed himself a savvy and ruthless campaigner. He hitched his career to Proposition 187. He not only endorsed it. He made anti-immigrant fervor the center of his campaign, and behind him his party climbed on the anti-immigrant bandwagon. White anxieties about the rising Latino population soon boiled into racial resentments, driven in no small measure by Wilson’s gritty, noir advertising that played to fears of lawless, dark-skinned immigrants overwhelming the state of California.
Mexican-Americans, some of whose families had been in California since the eighteenth century, were soon enduring taunts and challenges to “become a citizen or go back where you came from.”
Following what had become one of the most racially divisive campaigns in recent California history, Proposition 187 passed by large margins. Courts soon ruled the measure unconstitutional, but for Republicans it had provided a path to triumph. Not only did it carry Pete Wilson to a fifteen point victory, it brought California Republicans to dominance in the state senate (although the assembly remained narrowly Democratic).
But in the end, for the Republican Party the victory proved to be the political equivalent of a suicide bombing. Most of the engineers and technicians who lost jobs in the defense industry were Republicans, and hundreds of thousands of them had already left the state in search of new opportunities. In future years, California’s white population growth would be comparatively low. The party would have to recruit new supporters from some other group.
So, if the immediate result of Wilson’s immigrant bashing might have been to inflict grievous losses on Democrats, soon it became apparent that it had also sacrificed Republican prospects among the Latino population, which was (and is) California’s fastest growing demographic sector. Historically, Mexican immigrants were often wary of becoming U.S. citizens, and when they did they were only slightly more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. Many harbored dreams of returning to Mexico to retire.
But 1994 changed all that. By tarring Latinos as “illegals,” Republicans drove far more legal Mexican immigrants to become not only citizens and voters, but Democrats.
In this way, the campaign of ’94 destablilized the political establishment. The first temblor to strike came in the state elections of 1996. Latinos went to the polls in unprecedented numbers, helping to return the state senate to Democratic hands.
The gubernatorial election two years after that was a full-blown earthquake. Prior to 1994, in California gubernatorial elections, Latino voters had favored Democrats by about 6 percentage points. In 1998, Latinos helped elect Democrat Gray Davis to the governor’s office, giving him a whopping 61 point margin of the Latino vote, and helping carry Democrats to victory in five of seven statewide offices. Perhaps we could say that the “Big One” arrived in the elections of 2002, when Republicans failed to win a single statewide office. Their poor performance helped drive Republican donors to finance the notorious recall election the following year. In 2003, they succeeded in installing Arnold Schwarzenegger (an immigrant who broke with his party on immigration and so drew immigrant votes), but they have had precious few victories since then.
After 2003, in other states, as immigration from Mexico and elsewhere has reached new heights, national Republicans have mostly failed to heed the lessons of California history. (For that matter, so have California Republicans.) The anti-immigrant vitriol of the 2006 congressional elections could have been borrowed from Pete Wilson’s playbook. By the election of 2008, many leading Republicans were channeling Wilson’s campaign.
The results have been utterly predictable. Last fall, with critical margins from newly energized and many newly-registered Latinos, Democrats swamped Republicans in once reliable southwestern bastions like Nevada and Colorado. Back in the state where it all began, Republicans have not won a presidential election since 1988. In 2008, Barack Obama won California by margins not seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
Today, the Republican Party in California lags far behind in registrations and in elected officers. The only strategy of their legislative delegation is to deny Democrats the supermajority they need to determine budgets and taxes. Party prospects have seldom looked dimmer.
And yet national Republicans seem hell bent on repeating California’s mistakes even now. Newt Gingrich has denounced Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.” Gingrich, of course, was the visionary of 1994, who that year led Republicans to dominance in the U.S. Congress for the first time in forty years. He dreamed of a “permanent majority,” and pundits spoke of a national party realignment. In fact, the days of Republican dominance were already numbered. Nowhere was that clearer than out in the Golden State, where the overwhelming GOP triumph of 1994 paradoxically foreshadowed their party’s national unraveling.
Republicans should take heed – – but so too should Democrats and everyone else. In California, Republican self-destruction has not empowered Democrats as much as you might think. By some measures, since 1994 California has become less progressive, not more. The supermajority requirements for tax increases have taken a terrible toll. Elementary school funding has not improved. State funding for higher education takes up a smaller proportion of the budget than it did in 1994 (when it was already on a downward curve). The Democratic coalition of Latinos, Anglos, and African-Americans is often testy, and its fault lines helped bring on the recall of 2003 – -as we shall see in a future post. With minority Republicans blocking any tax increase, Democrats are girding themselves to slash state aid to the poor, medical care for children, higher education, state parks, and a host of other services. So the political structure of the Golden State continues to rattle and shake, and it’s impossible to tell if these are aftershocks or the precursors of the Big One headed our way.
In a two-party system, the collapse of a major party is a shock that takes years to absorb, particularly if the minority party is invested with extraordinary powers. Whether the majority can achieve supermajority status and drive the agenda might not be clear for some time. But another possible outcome is to change the system of governance and make the minority party less powerful. The prospects for a constitutional convention are looking better every day.
30 comments
May 29, 2009 at 3:12 pm
TF Smith
Interesting summary of an era that I lived through – I was in the Capitol the day that Speaker Brown beat Jim Brulte by one vote, that of a Republican from Whittier whose name escapes me at the moment; I was also in the LA County CCB the afternoon of the verdict in the King case…which leads me to the following point:
Doesn’t the noun “insurrection” imply some sort of political element to what would otherwise simply be regarded as mass violence/looting?
As in an insurrection is “an act or instance of rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government”?
Is “riot” no longer acceptable?
I mean, to put it into a historical perspective, are the “Civil War draft riots” in NYC now to be referred to as the “NYC draft insurrections”?
May 29, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Louis
TF Smith:
I have no particular stake in the word “insurrection.” I was just looking for some other word, since I refer to the “1992 riots” a little later in the piece. I suppose some might draw a distinction between them, but I was thinking of them as synonyms.
May 29, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Charlieford
Hmm. If we’re getting semantic about it, doesn’t “riot” connote a violent protest, where a group of people tries to get the power structure to accede to its demands, whereas “insurrection” connotes an attempt by some group to replace the power structure? Of course each has metaphorical usages also. But there does seem to be a slim connotative difference. The bread riots in Richmond in ’64 weren’t about replacing the Davis administration, but getting food prices down; the Viet Cong in the early sixties were insurrectionaries hoping to bring down the Diem government.
May 29, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Charlieford
Meant to say Louis these are very informative articles and I really appreciate them.
May 29, 2009 at 6:10 pm
PorJ
I second Charlieford’s praise. Thanks for these pieces.
But I’m curious whether you didn’t skip over Grey Davis’s problems a bit too quickly. Davis is lucky he’s not actually in jail, when you consider the way he insanely overpaid the energy traders – who were his biggest donors, but who then rigged the market (Davis says he was ignorant of it all). The whole thing really reeked of that classic California political corruption that Mike Davis writes about – except instead of the Oil Barons taking the LA basin its the energy companies robbing the state treasury.
So: sure, the structural issues make a lot of sense, but I don’t see a bunch of Governors around the USA making absolutely ridiculous deals that empty the state’s coffers for, essentially, nothing in return (as Davis did in 2002-3). Davis and the Democrats were also lucky to face Simon instead of Riordan in 2002 – one could argue that was the pivotal moment for the Republican party, too.
I’m not as confident that demography is destiny. The Democrats were very lucky Davis was thrown out of office. Another serious corruption scandal could relatively quickly revive the Republicans. I also don’t discount the threat of backlash – not in California, anyway, which has a rather extensive history of political success built upon it.
May 29, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Charlieford
I just realized that by referring to “the Davis administration” in my comment, given the topic of this article, someone might think I was referring to Grey Davis. It doesn’t help that grey was the color associated with the Davis administration I referred to. I apologize for whatever confusion I’ve generated. Not “generated” in the sense in which electricity gets generated however. “Generate” in the more obvious sense. Now I see that the first letters of the first five words that last sentence spell “Gitmo,” and some people might think I’m equating that with Andersonville. I have no comment on that. All I know is, mistakes were made.
May 29, 2009 at 8:33 pm
ari
It’s good to have you around, Charlie.
May 29, 2009 at 10:26 pm
herbert browne
The Watts rioters would have been, by their own reckoning, fairly quixotic “insurrectionists”… even if that’s ultimately what they desired, ie some autonomy from whitey & his establishment-shielding police. Maybe ghetto dwellers will have to settle for “rioters”, I guess… given that their homes, their businesses & their language all ultimately belong to “the Man”… and those organs of informational dissemination, as well.
“No such thing as a ‘terrorist-
no such thing at all…
it’s just a word the papers use
when the size of your army’s small.
No matter your cause is Just, my friend,
and your reasoning is sound,
if your army’s small you’re a ‘terrorist’-
and your home is an ‘underground’.
(where did I hear this?.. don’t recall…)
^..^
May 29, 2009 at 11:12 pm
gulo gordo
So it wasn’t a ‘chad riot’ the Republicans staged in Florida, but an insurrection? The Golf Shirt Insurrection?
Seriously, though, good stuff and thanks Louis.
The Democratic coalition of Latinos, Anglos, and African-Americans is often testy…
I look forward to your expansion on this theme. A crucial angle to progressive concerns at the moment — maybe especially to environmental issues, that’s where I’ve seen it in action — has to do with the non-urban portion of the Hispanic caucus in both the Assembly, and in California’s Congressional delegation. Even among bluedogs, it seems like Central Valley “business Dems” with Hispanic surnames have become Big Everybody’s best friends, and the Republicans’ keys to securing political goals in key arenas.
Shocking it isn’t, sure, but it does help to explain why Democratic majorities haven’t necessary translated to progressive policy changes on some major fronts: in operation, a lot of these politicos are creatures of the economic status quo at least as much as their Anglo and African-American brethren and sistren.
May 30, 2009 at 6:17 am
drip
These two posts have been great. I never really focused on white collar emigration as a factor before, but it helps explain the rise of the crazy right — the working engineers all left (for the south?) leaving the GOP to the small businessmen and the social conservatives, the ghosts of Richard Nixon and Ed Meese, if you will.
May 30, 2009 at 6:27 am
William
Bring back the WHIGS!
May 30, 2009 at 7:16 am
Anderson
Does Prof. Warren have a book out on California’s political history?
Because if not, I hope he’ll write one. I’d buy it, for history and analysis like this.
May 30, 2009 at 7:33 am
Vance
Thanks, Louis. As you say, one effect of the minority’s disproportionate power is to make the majority responsible for the minority’s preferences — if the D’s are being forced to take unpalatable actions visibly now, voters may not be inclined to forgive them.
The prospects for a constitutional convention are looking better every day.
I certainly hope so.
May 30, 2009 at 9:20 am
Dia
A really interesting post (as was your previous piece)
…the working engineers all left (for the south?) leaving the GOP to the small businessmen and the social conservatives
Do we know where they’re leaving for? What’s a more hospitable environment for a white-collar, Californian, self-styled exile?
May 30, 2009 at 9:45 am
Charlieford
This is what I do, Ari.
William, you should hook up with Daniel Walker Howe.
May 30, 2009 at 9:45 am
TF Smith
The working engineers did not “all” leave, by a long shot; take a look, ewven today, at the South Bay-Long Beach (TRW/NGST, Boeing, BAE); the “greater” San Fernando-Antelope Valley (Rocketdyne/JPL/Edwards/Plant 42); San Diego; and the South (SF) Bay (San Jose, Silicon Valley, etc).
In addition, much of the overall decline in white collar engineering employment in aerospace/defense in California has been primarily a demographic shift; as the Cold War generation retired, there were not enough jobs staying in the state to employ anything close to equivalent numbers of younger engineering and science professionals to keep the numbers up…
In a “sector” sense, what really left California in the 1980s and after were A) shipbuilding, and B) the airframe and spaceframe manufacturing; not in the sense that Lockheed left Burbank and built a new plant in Marietta (as an example), but in the sense that they already had two plants (or more) and those in the Southeast were (generally) newer than those in California, so if there were not enough aircraft being built to justify two plants, corporate management consolidated into GOP-run states, because that was where the votes were (at the time) on Capitol Hill. Hence, shipbuilding is consolidated on the Gulf Coast and in Virginia to the detriment of California and the Northeast; airframes are consolidated on the Great Plains and Southeast, to the detriment of California and (again) the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic.
Oddly enough, this mostly happened under the watch of GOP governors – Reagan, Deukmejian, Wilson, and (now) Schwarzenegger – which speaks volumes about how little interest California Republicans have in keeping unionized manufacturing jobs in the state; from that point of view, the South Bay (LA) democrats who kept LAAFB and the satellite manufacturers in LA County have had more positive impact on the state’s economy than all the Republicans in Sacramento or anywhere else.
What has stayed in SoCal are the R&D shops (Skunkworks, Phantom Works, Edwards, etc.) and the satellite/space probe business (NGST, Boeing, LAAFB, and JPL). National Shipbuilding in San Diego is a special case.
May 30, 2009 at 10:25 am
Louis
What a great bunch of comments. TF thanks for the lowdown on the history of LA aerospace & defense. That’s very helpful.
In terms of where relocating defense workers went, I don’t know if there’s any way to know. But the story some tell in Colorado is that many of them showed up there, and they contributed to the rightward shift in Colorado’s already right-leaning electorate in the 1990s. Some appear to have gone to Utah and Idaho, and of course many to Las Vegas (along with everybody else in the ’90s).
I don’t have a book on CA political history, but I’m working towards something like that. These posts are preliminary forays in that direction. Thank you again for all your comments.
L
May 30, 2009 at 10:25 am
Bruce
So, what political shift might today’s events point toward?
May 30, 2009 at 11:18 am
Hal
It’s worth remembering the large Latino component of the rioters of 1992. The LA Times reported (May 6, 1992),
While the anger over the injustice of the verdict regarding Mr King was one part of the violence, I have long believed another part was immigrant Latino anger over their own ghettoization.
Now for the personal anecdotal piece:
My employer at the time dealt with nearly every liquor store and grocery store in the Los Angeles metro region. The number of such stores that were burned, looted, or otherwise damaged was significant. From an accounts receivable point-of-view, my employer realized this was well out of the control of the store owners, and so arranged special terms for them for payment of our goods.
I was the guy who maintained the database of owners so treated.
The thing that stood out for me was the disproportionate number of Koreans among the owners. Because one could also sort our total database by address, one could frequently see neighboring liquor stores were generally unaffected. If you had a string of stores that were owned by Saul Goldberg, Cho Hyun Park, and LaToya Johnson, it was Mr. Park who was got hit.
It was very difficult to believe the rioters were random in their selection of stores, given this. Just why Korean store owners were targeted, I’ll leave to others to speculate — I can only report the data pointed that way.
May 30, 2009 at 11:21 am
Hal
…and sometimes, lots of revisions lead to more typos. Apologies.
May 30, 2009 at 11:37 am
Hal
Oh, and when it comes to the idea that Prop. 187 was the suicide bomb of the California Republican Party… I absolutely agree.
To give an idea to non-Californians just how draconian 187’s provisions were, as written: It insisted that one provide proof of citizenship for all state services. I carried my passport on a daily basis while it was working through the courts, because as far as I could tell that would include a California Highway Patrol officer’s assistance if my car broke down (say). Unless there was some part of “all” that was unclear to me. Of course, a driver’s license isn’t proof of citizenship.
Any resemblance to old South African or old Soviet policies regarding internal passports was, I’m sure, wholly coincidental. {cough}
May 30, 2009 at 11:50 am
Louis
Hal, great point about the Latino component of the LA Riots. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but the ethnic composition of those arrested during the riots is quite telling. A slight plurality were actually Latino (I saw the figures yesterday, and they’re something like 45% Latino, 41% African American, and 14% Non-Hispanic White.)
I haven’t been paying close attention, but as far as I can tell, there is no history of the LA Riots available. Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles is still one of the best things in print.
Bruce, as a historian I’m reluctant to engage/indulge in prophecy. Any prediction I make is bound to be wrong. But one of the biggest trends I see in California is voter frustration. Californians have been voting for social welfare and education for a long time, and they’re not getting what they voted for, because the party they’ve elected can’t deliver (supermajority precludes it) and the other one won’t. The state’s partisan divide is growing more bitter, as the Democratic, populous coast increasingly faces off against the Republican, less populous interior. Where this is going is anyone’s guess. But what’s left to rebel against? I haven’t seen polling on the constitutional convention, but the buzz is loud.
May 30, 2009 at 2:36 pm
kid bitzer
“Any prediction I make is bound to be wrong.”
that’s my prediction, too.
maybe we’re both cretans.
May 30, 2009 at 3:15 pm
bitchphd
Glad TF commented–my husband is one of those white engineers these days, and we’re happily settled in So. Cal. Where, btw, our R. representative (Gallegly) is secure in his seat because he kept the Navy base jobs here instead of letting them get shunted off to Moses Lake up in the desert (which would be a lot cheaper for the feds).
I suspect Drip is mistaken about CA small business owners. At least, most of those I’ve known throughout my life have been sort of Eisenhower Republicans or conservative Dems. My anecdotal guess is that it’s the farmers and ag businessmen that have moved the Republican party to the right, although that makes no sense in terms of the racism argument because they rely heavily on their Latino workforce. But ime it’s the guys with the rural backgrounds who are the most racist and irrationally anti-government, anti-taxes.
May 30, 2009 at 3:19 pm
bitchphd
Oh, and let me third the appreciation for these posts. So, so awesome.
May 30, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Ahistoricality
that’s my prediction, too.
maybe we’re both cretans.
Thus explaining why all the prophecy-seeking traffic shifted from Crete to Delphi….
May 30, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Matt Lister
By tarring Latinos as “illegals,” Republicans drove far more legal Mexican immigrants to become not only citizens and voters, but Democrats.
This is true, but leaves some important parts of the story out. The most important part is that around this time Mexico changed its citizenship laws. Until around this time, if you became a citizen of another country you had to give up Mexican citizenship. Dual citizenship wasn’t allowed and this was fairly actively enforced. This is important because of another point mentioned above- the belief (often proved wrong, but still strong) among immigrants that they’d return and retire in Mexico. Mexico, like many countries, places fairly strong limits on land ownership by non-citizens. (These have also been relaxed, but still exist.) Note that this doesn’t really apply to, say, apartments, but to they actual land. So, if you became a US citizen, you couldn’t own land in Mexico in most cases. When Mexico changed its citizenship laws to allow dual citizenship in some forms this changed, making dual citizenship much more attractive to Mexicans. At the same time the US was in the middle of a process of caring less about dual citizenship. There’s not much official policy on it. When you become a citizen you still must take an “oath of alligance”, but no real step it taken to make sure you give up other citizenship and the unofficial policy is that if the other country doesn’t care, the US doesn’t care, either. This has been developing over several years. These factors together, along with those noted in the post, made gaining citizenship for Mexican immigrants attractive for the first time.
May 30, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Louis
Matt, thank you. I did not know this history of Mexican citizenship, and that’s very helpful. As I recall, the U.S. was staunchly against dual citizenship as late as the ’70s. I knew people who were dual citizens (UK-US) but preferred to keep it quiet in the U.S., where such things were strictly against the law. Or at least that’s what I remember.
Any idea what drove the Mexican government to change its policies? I wonder if perhaps the need for large inflows of American dollars from expatriates led to a realization that some of those expatriates might need to become U.S. citizens in order to keep earning those dollars, if you see what I mean. Did Prop 187 play any role in the Mexican government’s calculus?
May 30, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Matt Lister
Louis- my understanding is that the reason for the change in Mexican policy (in addition to having different people in leadership positions, I guess) were for a few reasons- as you suggest, the desire to keep an influx of dollars, and also the idea that Mexican immigrants with dual citizenship could help influence US policy in a number of areas to be more favorable towards Mexico. I’m sure that Prop 187 payed a role, but how great of one I’m not sure. Some of this is speculation on the part of people who study this stuff more directly than I do (though I write on immigration I’m a consumer of the studies of the policies of different countries rather than a producer of them), but I think that there’s some pretty strong evidence for it. As for the US- you’re right that the attitude of the US towards dual citizenship has changed. Officially it’s not clear what it is, but generally in practice if the other country doesn’t do anything the US won’t either. There has been a general move towards more relaxed policies on dual citizenship around the world since the end of the cold war but there’s still a lot of variation. (I believe that Mexican citizens living abroad w/ dual citizenship are not allowed to vote in Mexican elections, for example, though they could if they went and lived in Mexico. The parallel case isn’t so for US citizens.)
May 31, 2009 at 11:48 pm
ericismygod
California’s problem is that the rump Republican party won’t let the Democrats raise more taxes? Not interesting enough to be bizarre or crazy, just kind of stupid.