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Photo from National Geographic. (And yes, OJB admits that these are actually elephant seals.)
An engorged Chumley takes to his blog to trumpet what he believes to be his moment of triumph:
At the next Democratic Party of Orange County meeting in about two weeks, I’ve put forth a resolution – my first as a member of the Central Committee – that was to address the need for making Anaheim a Sanctuary City. Sources tell me that the Resolutions Committee has actually expanded this idea to call on Democratic Party electeds to push for Sanctuary City status in every Orange County city which tells me the idea has merit.
In some cases, public discussion of what happens in DPOC Executive Committee meetings is acceptable to address an urgent and developing matter; I’ve done it myself where it seemed warranted and I had announced my intentions. As a rule, though, premature discussion of what happens in closed meetings is taboo, and in some cases it’s actually proscribed. Nonetheless, I think that it’s fair to set the record straight when a committee member, supposedly relying on “sources,” makes a factually incorrect assertion about party activity. I’ll offer the minimum specifics needed to correct the misstatement– and will then go on a richly deserved rant.
Put aside the wandering tense of that first sentence — “At the … meeting in about two weeks, I’ve put forth a resolution … that was to address” — and focus on the second one. I do not purport to speak here for the DPOC, but I am a member of the Executive Committee that met on Monday night. That committee did vote on a resolution that is clearly the one about which Chumley’s alleged multiple “sources” reported to him. And NO — no resolution (at least none that will have gone through the normal process) that “calls on Democratic Party electeds to push for Sanctuary City status in every Orange County city” is going to be submitted to the Central Committee on February 27.
A well-written and reasoned resolution on enforcement of immigration laws will appear, but the description offered to or by Chumley is well off-base. Because Chumley’s de facto Republican partner at the Anaheim Blog will likely seize on Chumley’s statement to depict OC Democrats as being extreme, I think that it’s worth setting that record straight without delay.
No: unless something extraordinarily unexpected happens, DPOC is NOT going to call on Councilmembers Melissa Fox of Irvine, Jesus Silva of Fullerton, Jill Hardy of Huntington Beach, Katrina Foley of Costa Mesa, Kris Beard of Garden Grove, Sergio Contreras of Westminster, Letitia Clark of Tustin, Tita Smith of Orange, Rose Espinoza of La Habra, Art Brown of Buena Park, and Jose Moreno or Anaheim (along with a smattering of others, most of whom are either solitary Democrats on their Councils or one of a mere pair) to submit “Sanctuary City” resolutions in their cities. (I want to clarify that fact because that is literally what Chumley says the DPOC is going to do — and it isn’t. Why not? Because we’re not cork-headed rampaging idiots.)
People will see what we are calling for in due time — and it will be a strong and appropriate response to President Trump’s agenda. But when it comes to pressing for the “Sanctuary City” label — and the only defining feature of “Sanctuary City” status that people agree upon is that label itself — I can’t imagine that DPOC would do more than to encourage each minority Democratic Councilmember to use their own good political judgment regarding what approach would best work in their city to ameliorate the misery of xenophobic Trumpism.
Chumley then moves on to lie about his own motivation for his “first try at a resolution”:
I initially started a push for Sanctuary City status in Anaheim after the rapid, brave and unanimous action by the Santa Ana City Council to defy President Trump.
Why Anaheim?
Because every candidate endorsed by the DPOC in November’s election, as well as Democrats who ran without the party’s endorsement, ran with support for Sanctuary City status on their campaign platform and the city’s large immigrant population. It made sense. And it’s my first try at a resolution. My plan was to expand this to Fullerton, Orange and Garden Grove if the effort in Anaheim was successful and to continue adding cities. The first person I asked to sign was Benny Diaz and he couldn’t get his pen out fast enough. I had the required number of signatures in about 3 minutes.
(Note: I’m not sure that endorsed Democrat Leonard Lahtinen in Anaheim District 1 endorsed Sanctuary Cities — and I’m less sure that Chumley bothered to check. I’m also not sure what it was that Chumley had Benny Diaz and eight other DPOC members (taking twenty seconds apiece) sign, but it wasn’t the “required” number to get something submitted to the Resolutions Committee (or directly to the Executive Committee) — because the required number for that is “one.” Submitting a resolution directly to the Central Committee meeting does require ten signatures (among other things), but there’s no reason to do that more than two weeks before the meeting.)
At any rate, no, this was not Chumley’s motivation for choosing Anaheim to be the first OC city not dominated by Latinos to pass a “Sanctuary City” policy. His motivation was to put his (and his political pin-up Jordan Brandman’s) nemesis Dr. Moreno into hot water by making unreasonable and unyielding demands of him. Chumley later contends that “Moreno should put forth a motion to make Anaheim a Sanctuary City even if the Republican majority on the council votes it down.”
A time for one to burn oneself on the pyre of a solo dissenting vote for a good cause may come — but that’s not likely to be true when one has a good and compelling alternative that can lead to useful legislation actually passing. Moreno — who, unlike Chumley, is actually a thoughtful and deft politician — seems to have a good plan to steer Anaheim to substantively good and human policies in this area with a majority of the Council in agreement. Chumley’s fear here seems to be that — yes, by starting with the Mayoral Task Force to build consensus — Moreno’s efforts might succeed. By making uncharacteristically strident demands — seriously, Business Democrat Chumley is not well-cast for this role — he hoped to make Moreno’s position untenable. (I leave the question of why the hell he’d do this as an exercise for readers.)
Chumley tips his hands by supporting Anaheim Councilwoman Kris Murray’s dastardly proposal — which I’m delighted to say is going to backfire in her face, by the way — to demand that the Mayoral Task Force be videoed, live-streamed, and published on the city’s website. The difference — as Murray probably knows and Chumley probably doesn’t — between a Board or Commission, on the one hand, and a Task Force on the other is that the former lead directly to policymaking and the latter does not. A Task Force allows for informal engagement — more akin to brainstorming than to formal debate and voting — and that’s why one not only does not need to treat it like a Council meeting but one needs not to do so, especially when (as Dr. Moreno sensitively noted from the podium last week) when it addresses an emotionally and politically fraught issue like immigration enforcement.
You stick cameras in people’s faces, in a Task Force on a sensitive subject, only if you want it to fail. Murray wants to run for Supervisor, in a much more conservative district than the City of Anaheim itself, against the sorts of ideas and ideals that Dr. Moreno champions. Chumley may (or may not) truly favor those views himself, but what he really wants is for Moreno, personally, to fail — in part by estranging himself from the voting public. Why desire that? Perhaps the difference between Moreno and Chumley is that Trump’s policies are a serious threat to Moreno and those he loves, creating a crisis that eliminates the option of simply “playing politics” — whereas for Chumley, the chance to dress himself up as a latter-day Cesar Chavez is exactly that: a sort of role-playing game that he can set down at the end of the day while trundling back to Northwoods.
Chumley does rightly note that a lot of “Welcoming Cities” are also “Sanctuary Cities” — but it does not seem to permeate through his skull that moving in that order might be the right approach for a traditionally conservative city like Anaheim. Moreno has thought through his strategy and tactics; Chumley seems proud of not having bothered.
Chumley’s final substantive claim is that
by strengthening my resolution, the Party’s resolution [sic] committee is saying all elected Democrats should do the same even if they lack the votes to pass the measure because it tells our immigrant communities which party stands with them and which party does not.
If Chumley is really going to try to pretend to be a leftist, he has a lot to learn. Sometimes, indeed, one acts to highlight the contradictions between the parties. But when one is dealing with reasonably sympathetic members of the opposing party — most clearly, Tait and Vanderbilt — that’s not the best choice. Actually making good policy is preferable to a merely symbolic stand — and Moreno has the chops and the opportunity to pull it off. The upcoming DPOC resolution will, in my opinion, strengthen his hand. This is especially true in a crisis — and the Trump Presidency does present immigrants with a crisis! Political effectiveness, when (as here) it is within reach, becomes most critical at such times.
Chumley’s sin, however, in championing his misconstrued version of the upcoming resolution is not primarily against Dr. Moreno. A supposed DPOC demand that every OC Democratic Councilmember from Melissa Fox to Art Brown should pick a symbolic fight that they will almost surely lose badly has the effect of alienating the party from an electorate that is wary of the misleading “Sanctuary City” label.
Santa Ana ends up fine, and maybe Anaheim does as well thanks to the cooperation between Moreno and Tait. But demanding that DPOC tell every officeholder not simply to push to focus limited resources on keeping the peace in (largely by winning the cooperation of) minority and immigrant neighborhoods rather than helping ICE increase the level of conflict therein, but also to do so under the banner of a supposedly stronger brand (and I’d love to see whether Chumley has “product testing” evidence on that contention of his — that’s just dumb posturing at best.
Chumley, like Matt Cunningham, just doesn’t like Moreno; I get it. But to let that anti-Moreno animus spur him to celebrate making an inflammatory rather than a reasonable demand of all OC officeholders — that’s just wrong. We can’t afford that sort of silliness now.
Wow. Lil’ Clumski’s maiden resolution goes down if flames. Then back to boot camp to work on that first chin up.
Fictitious characters including “David Vasquez” have ridden to Chumley’s rescue! Sadly, you just can’t save some people.
Chumley responds to this article by denying that he “hates Moreno,” which is a real Kellyanne Conway move given that I never made that assertion (I said that he and Cunningham “don’t like” him, but Chumley doesn’t do shades of gray.) But then I read on and a light bulb clicked on:
Leave aside the question about whether (1) someone misinformed Chumley about the need for signatures at this point or (2) he just didn’t understand what they told him. Focus on “… govern on the issues he campaigned on.”
DID Moreno “campaign on” pushing for Anaheim to become a formally labeled “Sanctuary City”?
I think of Moreno’s position as being close to LAPD Chief Charlie Beck’s: arresting and deporting people for mere “status” violations is bad, and hurts to cooperation needed for community policing, and that cities should not seek to cooperate with it; but when faced with lawful court orders to release prisoners to DHS cities do have to comply. (That last bit — “we will hide you from the oppressive government,” like Denmark tried to hide its Jewish residents from the Nazis — is what people seem to think of when they hear the term “Sanctuary Cities.”)
DID Jose commit in his campaign to the pushing Anaheim to adopt this most hardline position? I couldn’t remember him doing so. So I went to his campaign website to check. Here’s his “Message to Voters” page:
He campaigns on a lot of issues there, but a hardline position on “Sanctuary Cities” is not among them. In fact, he doesn’t mention government resistance to federal immigration policy at all.
Let’s check his “Why I’m Running” page — http://www.drjosefmoreno.com/running — just the subcategories, I won’t reprint all of the contents (although I did check them all for mention of “Sanctuary Cities” and found none):
Moreno mentions A WHOLE LOT of issues among these six subsections. Resisting federal immigration enforcement efforts is not among them. “Sanctuary Cities” is never mentioned. The closest he came to the topic was this, under “Keeping Our Community Safe”:
At this point I’m afraid I have to apologize to readers — for taking Chumley (and his doppelganger Cunningham, who has been beating on the same “he made campaign promises!” drum) WAY too seriously.
To the extent that Moreno EVER campaigned on “Sanctuary Cities,” it was not among his top two dozen issues. Chumley’s statement placed in bold above — “I want him to govern on the issues he campaigned on and he’s not.” seems likely to be predicated on a brazen, Trumpian lie. It’s not only not Chumley’s motivation — it COULDN’T be because the very premise of what Moreno campaigned on is wrong!
Now maybe Moreno did mention this in a speech or something, but that doesn’t mean that it was a significant reason he won support. The onus is now on Chumley to point out where Moreno said, during his campaign, what Chumley has repeatedly assured us that he said.
If Chumley just made this up, then he owes an apology to both Moreno and to the DPOC Resolutions and Executive committees for lying to them. (Like Trump, though, he’ll never apologize.) As for his trying to hang the probably not-so-popular “Sanctuary City” label on Democrats in the 32 cities and more unincorporated areas that aren’t Santa Ana (where the label plays well) and Anaheim — you know, the primary thesis of this article, as reflected in its headline! — just to get a dig in on Moreno, Chumley’s answers to this piece don’t even address the point.
I guess that that’s understandable.
Someone who can reliably and promptly get their comments onto Cunningham’s blog pages may want to ask Matty to put up or shut up as well:
http://www.ocdaily.net/pg/anaheim-tait-and-moreno-straddle-political-fissure-of-sanctuary-cities/ — “during the 2016 campaign District 3 Councilmember Jose F. Moreno unabashedly supported turning Anaheim into a sanctuary city”
http://www.ocdaily.net/pg/newly-elected-councilman-jose-f-moreno-hints-at-pursuing-sanctuary-city-status-for-anaheim/ — “Councilman-elect Jose F. Moreno, chairman of the Cal State Long Beach Chicano Studies Department, strongly hinted he will pursue sanctuary city status for Orange County’s largest city.” [The “hint” seems to be entirely within Cunningham’s head.]
I waded further through a Google Search, to no avail. I hope that we can all agree that Moreno’s “campaign” for the District 1 seat ended at 8:00 p.m. on November 8, 2016. Within the scope of a decent search, I can’t find a single instance of Moreno campaigning on “sanctuary cities” during this past campaign cycle. If Matty can’t produce one, then it seems that he should apologize as well — at least for misleading credulous Chumley!
Boy, Matt’s a pretty big liar, huh? Does that make Chumley a liar, or a dupe?
I started to waver when you started with the motive part…then I recalled the inane pettiness of the personal attacks that are a hallmark of Chmielikooksy’s blog,”The Liberal (sic) OC.” If any readers have not wandered through this septic field of online free open and unrestricted journalism, I recommend wearing boots when you do so. Yup, walrus poop.
This exchange recently took place in Chumleystan, and while it could fit in comments to various of our recent stories I think that it best fits here:
I can think of only one person who follows the blog so closely AND has a good enough memory to dredge up my “Buquer Ti Oashington” slap at Gustavo from a year and a half ago. Fess up, my friend; I know you have my email address! (But note too — I didn’t say that Chumley was a latter-day Cesar Chavez, but just that he is “dressing himself up as” one. It’s in this very story!
While Gustavo would argue that “The Weekly has ALWAYS been great,” it really is hitting on all cylinders now as a strong alt-journalism site. I get the sense that even they might admit that there’s new — and self-critical — life in the Democratic Party now, possibly giving even practised cynics a faction in one of the main parties to root for. And if I had known that Chumley would turn into “Johnny One Note” with the Backpage.com attack on Gustavo, I never would have brought it up years ago in the first place. It was a cheap shot, justified only by my having received many cheap shots, but that chapter in the Weekly’s history is over.
As Chumley clearly reads this page, it’s sad (not “SAD!”, just sad) that he doesn’t reply to the point I make above that the assertion that calling for Anaheim to enact a “Sanctuary City” law had any, or at least more than a very minor, role in Dr. Moreno’s campaign appears to be entirely bogus.
As for his attacks: they seem to be losing steam (or whatever gas it is that he pumps into them.)
Tait has already lifted more than just a finger to moderate the GOP position on an immigration crackdown. But Chumley’s actual complaint is oddly phrased: that he won’t “lift a finger to help anyone who’s a non-felon get taken in or deported by ICE.” Well, uh, what does Chumley suggest that the City do in cases where a given individual has already been put into immigration detention or removed? Send Anaheim’s police out there to extract the person, maybe using one of the helicopters? Seriously, what is he talking about here? What does Santa Ana do — pay for their lawyers?
I agree that Tait probably “doesn’t want a Sanctuary City status for Anaheim” because (1) the popular will seems to be against it, (2) it may very well take place millions of federal funds at risk, and (3) there may be ways short of trumpeting “Sanctuary City status” that can accomplish much the same thing from more defensible territory. I think that reasonable people of good will can disagree about these things, especially in a City without Santa Ana’s demographics. (By the way — has he asked SAPD how it feels about three or four of the candidates it supported favoring “Sanctuary City” status? THAT is an interesting story. But to say that Tait doesn’t want to lose federal funds because “he has a big staffer’s salary to pay” is simply moronic and that “her pension is the only one he cares about” is vile. Maybe he ought to read my interview with Tait, where he spells it all out nicely.
Finally, it’s sad to have to spell this out for someone who fancies himself a political writer, but: there IS something to the phrase that “politics is the art of the possible.” Dr. Moreno may personally favor a camping ordinance and Sanctuary City status, but he’s in a city where he’s the only one of his political stripe on the Council and the public is largely hostile to those measures, for both reasonable and unreasonable reasons. He can state where he stands (and he did), but he can’t and didn’t promise that his one vote could outweigh seven others. What he did promise is that he would work to get the most humane possible policies out of the City — the key modifier there being possible. I respected José even before he ascended to the dais, but to see how thoughtful, creative, and reasonable he is when it comes to pushing for humane and responsible policies has been a delight. That Chumley can’t see it — and, to be fair, he probably hasn’t watched even a minute of Dr. Moreno on the dais — is very telling. And, yes, “SAD!”
This fellow (or girl) also follows my and Donna’s facebook walls closely.
One little thing – I don’t remember when I took down the Koch Boycott ad, it was at least half a year ago. I just got tired of it; I had to make room for paid political ads; Ryan hated it; and it MAY also have been because the Kochs were opposing Trump at the time.