Today in California Democrats
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Even when they’re the product of one party just refusing to try to compete for the median vote rather than anti-democratic gerrymandering, one party states are sometimes not conducive to quality political leadership:
The president of the Los Angeles City Council faced widespread calls to resign on Sunday after a leaked audio recording revealed racist and disparaging remarks about the Black child of a white council member and also about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood.
The comments, made during a meeting last year with two other council members and a labor official, exposed longstanding racial tensions in the governance of one of the nation’s most multicultural cities as well as fault lines among the city’s Democrats.
In the profanity-laced recording, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times and which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, the City Council president, Nury Martinez, who is Latina, compared the Black child of a white council member to a “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark people.”
It was unclear who leaked the recording of the October 2021 meeting, which included Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, council members representing parts of the city’s East Side, and Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Also unknown was who made the recording, which was initially uploaded to Reddit earlier this month by an unidentified, now-suspended user, and continued to circulate via email after the post was taken down. No one has disputed the recording’s authenticity, and Ms. Martinez and Mr. de León have issued apologies.
[…]
Ms. Martinez also weighed in on a dispute between two Black council members over whose district would include Exposition Park and the University of Southern California. Rather than fight among themselves, she said, they should demand a map in which one of them gets the massive Los Angeles International Airport. That asset, she noted, is in the district of a white council member, Mike Bonin, whom she referred to with a vulgarity.
In the ensuing exchange, Mr. de León referred to Mr. Bonin, a West Los Angeles liberal, as the council’s “fourth Black member” and joked with Ms. Martinez that Mr. Bonin carried his adopted son, who is Black, as if the toddler were a designer handbag. Ms. Martinez complained that on a parade float on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. Bonin had failed to control his son and said that the child’s antics had nearly tipped the float over.
The fact that Dianne Feinstein has represented an increasingly blue California in the Senate since the McKinley administration seems absolutely inexplicable, until you remember that de León was somehow the best competition the party could come up with during the last cycle.