There's been a push throughout California to get rid of at large seats for various kinds of municipal entities, school districts, and also city councils. And here to talk with me about this change happening in a pretty large municipality within the Sanwaquin Valley from the City of Clovis. He is a several year now, how many years have you been a city council in now?
Just finish?
You just finished your seventh year. Okay, in his second term as a city council member. Currently the mayor of Clovis. My friend Vong Muanatua. Good have you on the show far.
Thanks for having me, John.
All right, yeah, so let's let's dig into this. So the City of Clovis this week had its city council meeting, and among the issues it was discussing was the topic of moving the closed city council seat elections from at large seats where every member, every citizen of Clovis votes for all of the members of the Clovis City Council, and shifting to each council member representing a specific geographic
district within the City of Clovis. So maybe you could tell me about why that change is happening and what's sort of prompting that change. It seems like it's part of a larger trend that's happening throughout California.
Yes, this is all sort of initiated by the California Voting Reiights Act CVRA. So under that act, which has been around for a while, and usually the thresholders when you reach one hundred thousand, kind of the population mark, you sort of transition, and so we've been at one hundred thousand for several years. But what prompts it is an attorney will usually write a demand letter.
So yeah, as so much of the world works, so.
Once they write the demand letter you then it puts you sort of in a cycle in which you would have to switch sort of like a ninety five day but forty five days from when you first receive it. You have to respond and said yes, we will or you say no, and then he will.
Most likely you say no, he's going to sue this.
Yeah, And so we received that from an attorney down south who's been doing this all over the states, sort of like when the ADA, the American with Disabilities Act, all these attorneys was just writing the shows.
It strikes me as odd that there isn't just a clear like dividing, like a hard line rule like you pass x population threshold, you have to switch to it, as opposed to a system where you're just waiting for you know, the sword of damnicles to fault, like like some random attorney to sue you to prompt it. And I guess did you guys just basically assess that after you receive this demand that it was unlikely for the city to win an a legal challenge.
Yeah, there has not been one jurisdiction who has received a demand letter and or who has actually contested as everyone okay, so that it's sort of a you know, financial decision more so than a we want are district?
Are you going to waste the citizen of clothes the citizens of clothes money, Like, let's fight this thing, as opposed to all right, well, we seems like this is just something we have to do, Okay.
So the intent of the law, though, is to try to get diversity and or get certain sectors of the community who are underserved underrepresented. And so, for example, the argument has made that since I am mong and I ran and I never got in it could be because it's at large, so the white population is drowning my Mong vote.
But the irony of it, yes, here you are.
Yeah, the irony of it is John, it actually dilutes my vote. Really, So if it's at large, I could have gotten the Mong vot from every single Mong citizen resident in Clovis, but now they actually divide me up.
Well because it kind of it kind of seems to assume that racial ethnic minorities are congregated in like little ethnic enclass, almost as opposed to the reality and many I'm sure throughout California, which is that, I don't know. The Mong community is probably about is. I don't know. There's probably some neighborhoods where they're more among people, but it seems like it's pretty diffused.
Yeah, and especially in Clovis. Yeah, you will not be able to find. Oh, there's the Latino community, there's the black community.
Yeah, and so we're all, yeah, what's the Mong part of town. I don't know. I lived in close my whole life. I don't know what that is.
Well, the the the insulting thing about this law is that it assumes every ethnic group votes the same as well, so they're assuming that all mong will just vote for the Mong candidate, all Latinos will vote for the Latino candidate, right, and that that is totally absurd.
Well, yeah, and it seems like I can kind of understand that it's it's rooted in like, you know, the there were these historically racist practices in the American South, where like you would take the African you know, the one African American neighborhood in a Southern city and you know, either just have that be one district and all the other districts had no Black people voters in it, or you take the black neighborhood and divide it up like a you know, a bunch of pizza slices to totally
dilute its power. But I just don't feel like that historical context is relevant to California of today, like like that, I mean, I you know, the situation of racial and ethnic minorities like Latinos or whatever in California is just not the same as you know, African Americans living under
Joe Crow, you know. So anyway, so regardless of that, now and then the cynical side of me thinks that the idea of this is Clovis is at large a very very conservative city, and if you divide it into individual districts, maybe there's some thought that Democrats can you pick up maybe one or two individual districts if you carve.
If you carve Clovis up the right way, quote the right way, which I'm sure for liberals will mean in a way that's politically advantageous for them, maybe you can get one or two seats to be controlled by Democrats. So I want to ask you about the individual proposals for dividing the city into city council districts. So the
two main divisions seem to be one. Should Clovis adopt a strong mayor system where we have four city council members and a mayor, kind of more analogous to like the city of Fresno, where Jerry Dyer is not a member of the city council. The current vong you are the mayor of clothes, but really you're the premus into paras. You're the first among equals. You're you're you're just a member of the city council and you as mayor, you just direct the meetings.
That's right.
The big question before you, guys, is four council members with a strong mayor or just keep five council members with the mayor just being you know, the president of the council. So I want to ask what your thoughts are on those two options and and what what is your personal preference. I'm curious to hear how you think about this issue.
Well, m you just clarify, with the four plus one, it is not a strong mayor system.
It's not really a strong not so it's.
Still just five council members. Only that the mayor is neglected at large. So that's the only difference.
Okay.
To have a strong mayor, we would have to actually revamp everything, put new ordinances in to actually empower the mayor to have the authorities that we see in Fresno really is just one voted at large R four through districts.
Okay, well, wow, I did I didn't even realize that. Okay, Okay, Well that's that's an interesting difference. All right, Well, I guess between those two options, what what would be your pick?
Well, too, in order to keep some sort of where the citizens feel like they are having influence, have the opportunity to reach everyone, I'd like the five at large. So all five five districts, so that way the mayor is rotated like how we have right now, Okay, So that way every council member knows they're going to have
to answer to the whole community at some time. I think the biggest fear of Clovis citizens is if we do go to districts, we will start only answering to our constituents instead of answering to the city as a whole.
Well, that's always like a criticism in Fresno, like whoever represents I think it's District six, which is kind of the North Fresnok kind of woodward parky thing. Whoever's there is always hit with the accusation you don't care about what's happening in South Presny. You just care about all
the rich fat cats up there. And that is one of the I think one of the worst things about switching from at lard to at large to individual geographic districts is that there is kind of that natural I mean maybe there there is to a certain extent, maybe a natural temptation towards that, and you you know, it's a little bit I mean, if you elect virtuous people to office, who have a real civic minded attitude. Who who say, yes, I'm elected to represent this district of Clovis,
but I care about the well being of all of clothes. Well, I mean you, yes, there are good people like that, but sometimes there aren't, and and and and there are natural little tribalisms that can develop.
And that's that's what you just said there, because the the rest of the city cannot vote me out right, So as long as my little you know, tribe here keeps voting me in, right, who cares what old town says? Because I'm in close he's here. Who cares what Harlan Ranch says now? Because I I'm only from close east.
Well, and even like for I mean, like for your just your most recent election, as an example, how many people actually voted for I mean, do you know off the top of your head.
Yeah, it's in almost thirty thousand, so twenty five twenty eight depending And that's so you know, that's a large increase from when we used to be odd year March elections. Right, this is the second and it's a presidential as well.
Yeah, so you're getting only twenty five thousand people to vote for you in an at large election. So let's divide that by five, you know. I mean, so then one individual council member can secure their seat with five or six thousand people voting for them. I mean that that seems like that makes you a lot less kind of accountable. I mean, there's a lot fewer people that have to be accountable.
To and it takes away the rights of the individual citizens who are voting. Yeah, off, five make a decision that affect you. Sure you can only select.
One, right, Yeah, yeah, well that's that's true.
The one positive though, John is Okay, now I'm trying to get one hundred and twenty five, one hundred and thirty thousand people to know my message. Okay, maybe it's less expensive to run a campaign. Sure, you have to reach fewer people, and so maybe on that end it helps someone who has less connections as a city. In a city, now you only want to reach five thousand people.
Sure, but it is still I mean it's not like, you know, Clovis is not that big. I mean, it's not like we're talking to city of six hundred thousand people or anything. Anyway, I digress. So, well, let me go through. So in your personal preference, then would be five council members, not the four council members with districts plus one at large council. That is correct.
That is your view, okay, and I think that's the consensus of the council from this last meeting. We've directed and ultimately it's the council who makes the decision, even though there's a lot of input from the citizens. We did direct the demographer and also made a sort of a decision that citizens, unless there is a huge group that is submitting mass with a four plus one, we're directing citizens to just submit the five district maps.
Okay. Yeah, because I had seen I think a week or so ago when I first talked with you about this, I had seen there were different proposals from citizens that were on the website. It seemed like half and half. But obviously this is a thing that the council can direct, So it's you're sort of settled on five, you know.
Let me ask you. One of the things with recentmap redrawing of the map that happened with the Fresno County Board of Supervisors was there was a lot of fighting over it, and a lot of the fighting was from certain kinds of left wing groups like Dolores Weerta's organization was really pushing for a certain kind of map. The County Board of Supervisors, excuse me, the County Board of Supervisors adopted a different map, which was much to the
displeasure of the Dolores wwareses of the world. Has there been any kind of really politicized map proposals that have come to you, guys, or proposals that you've identified as such.
No, that there are very very strict rules with regards to sort of the social economic makeup, the variance within the population of the five districts, and so the maps that have been proposed the three for the five at large, and the variance in population between the five districts, it's only about five percent, okay, So the threshold is nine percent, and if it goes over nine percent, then that map is dead.
Okay, yeah, yeah, And so there are.
Strict rules that they try to make it where it has the most diverse amount of diverse meaning home types, to income, to education, so it has all that breakdown. So if you go to the website you actually look at the map, the map actually gives you data on the back end. If you click the next page, it'll tell you Okay, how many of this economic level, income level, and so it gives you all that in the right, so we try to make it as diverse as possible.
One way that I feel like the California Voter Rights Act has been used is to sort of basically to make being Latino being a minority of some sort almost it's that is something that can't be broken up when I think the real goal of the people pushing that is we want more, you know, solid powerful enclaves of
Democrat voters. Is the real motivation behind that. Have you found with any of the map proposals, because you have to kind of respect the California Voter Rights X, you know, provisions about not breaking up you know, ethnic minority populations, although in Clovis, I'm not sure if our ethnic minority is the majority. I'm not sure if Latinos are actually the majority in Clovis or if.
All they're the majority. Whites are actually a minority, right.
Right, Okay, some whites have a plurality anyway, Has there been any so you haven't really seen with any of the proposed maps any kind of shenanigans that are that are clearly designed for, you know, just Democrats. To try to pick up some seats or something.
No, I mean, it does give breakdown on registration, and so it does give that, but it a couple of the maps do show where there is the highest percentage of Latino voters, okay, and so it does give that sure information. But other than that, it's it's hard to tell.
Okay, all right, Well, it sounds like it's not something you guys are thrilled with, but hopefully it's going to happen in a way that's you know, at least still having somewhat representative council that does represent the citizenry as a whole. So, and any last thoughts on the whole time.
I believe that if Clovis has to do this, we can do it better. Sure, And not only that, I am encouraging and I am encouraged that the smaller pockets of voters will then be able to organize easier and actually vote and hold accountable their individual council members and so on that end it it'll be easier. So there's a smaller group we can go No, we don't want you just to represent us. We're voting you to represent
the entire city. And you've been voting this way, so I am hopeful that the citizens will be able to do that.
So I hope so too.
Yeah, please stay, engage close residents, and please draw your maps and come to you have three more meetings, so two more map meetings and one final meeting in which the council will look at whatever maps are available and make that decision, and that'll be on I think the adoption meeting is March tenth.
Okay, so by March tenth we'll kind of know what we're doing, all right, Close City Council Member maryor Clovis vong Wana twa, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me, John, all right, we'll be back with more on The John Girardi Show. It really fills me with resentment that liberals throughout the state of California just bully municipalities like Clovis into changing the structure of
their city council. So we just had vong wan Atua, who's the close city council member, the mayor of Clovis, who is discussing all this in the last segment or
thanks to vong for coming on the show. It just frustrates me how cities have to do this now that basically you have a city it's got at large elections for its city council members, and some left wing lawyer who wants to just make a buck suing cities comes over and says, hey, you need to change your whole elections structure, as if there wasn't some way for California
just to institute the change. Hey, once you have a population that is measured to be over x threshold for five consecutive years, then you have to switch to you Then you have to switch from at large city councils to individual district city councils. Instead of clear guidance like that, No, we have to have cities living in fear of litigation and be bullied into it by some lawyer sending a threatening letter. And it's not just cities that are impacted
by this. By the way, Clovis Unified School District is being bullied into this as well. And I think it's even worse for school districts than it is for city councils. One for the reason Vong talks about, I mean, in Clovis, it used to be that all of the city council members were accountable to all of the citizenry of Clovis. You had to have broad based support from a fairly large population base. Now you you know, he got twenty
five thousand votes in his most recent election. Now he's you know, if he gets five thousand votes as an city council member representing a little chunk of Clovis, five thousand votes will get him in. Well, that's the same. Maybe that's even worse. When you're talking about school districts. You're going to be accountable to just the voters from this high school, just the voters from that high school, as well as the kind of petty regional jealousies that
can result. I think it's really bad for city councils. I mean that has always been the problem. Within Fresdent Unified people will always accuse the Bullard representative of oh, you just care about all the rich people who live near Bullard, you don't actually care about blah blah blah blah blah. Those kinds of petty squabbles immediately happen. So it's frustrating to me. How it really is frustrating to me how we're being pushed into this change in the
city of Clovis. And I'm sure it's gonna happen with other cities in the salon Kin Valley once they get over a certain threshold of about one hundred thousand people, that we're going to have to change our whole system of city government to something that's not clearly better, but something where Democrats think that they can pick up more
seats and manipulate the redistricting system. When we return, we're going to talk a little bit about immigration stuff, immigration news changes to that the Trump administration is brought about, and I want to talk about how this works from a justice standpoint. That's next on the John Girardi Show. I want to talk about changes the Trump administration has made with immigration policy, as well as even just the change the proposal from the Trump administration the Executive Order
to change the national understanding of birthright citizenship. Are you a citizen just by virtue of being born on American soil. I'm going to talk about these two topics in different ways about the course of this segment, all right, I want to start just with Trump immigration policy. So Trump has obviously changed a lot with immigration enforcement. As soon as he comes in, it's going to go back to
the remain and the remain in Mexico. Policy is going to come right back into play, and there's now I guess this is one of the terrible things about the Biden policy, the Biden immigration policies, is the whiplash for the immigrants themselves coming into the country illegally or in the weird quasi legal structure that Biden put in place.
And this is the point I want to set up that there is some aspect of what's happening that is, you know, I'm concerned about illegal immigration for a lot of reasons, a lot of reasons because it's deeply unfair to the citizens in this country, because our lacks immigration standards have led to criminals coming into this country who commit crimes against our own citizenry, because our lax immigration policies lead to just a cheap basically, there's this desire
to maintain an almost helot like cheap labor force in this country that white liberals act as though as some kind of virtue. That was the silliest thing from Remember the episcopal bishop who was lecturing Trump advance at the National Cathedral her the way she was justifying her critique
of Trump's policies. When it came to immigration was to ask, you know, where are people going to come who serve us our food and you know, work in our hotels and stuff, As if it's like a good thing to have this permanent underclass in a perilous non citizen status constantly there to serve us, as if that is something just, as if that liberal reality, that effect of liberal immigration policy is something good, and as if I'm supposed to feel like I'm an unjust person for saying, Hey, no,
I don't think we should allow unrestricted immigration for service industry jobs, where we can pay people under the table, and pay them under the table in ways that are somewhat abusive, because these employees know if they make too much noise given their illegal status, they could be their employer could ship their rear home with one call to ice or whatever. No, that's not a just system anyway,
I digress. One of the ways in which Biden allowed people to get into the country in a legal slash illegal way, basically a thing that gave legal cover of law to people who were just coming unlawfully, was through this thing called the CBP one app. And this app basically allowed people people were coming They're coming through Mexico. They're coming to a border point, some sort of border
patrol point to make an asylum claim. The app basically allowed people to sort of grease the skids for that process. Get all your stuff ready, get you get to an immigration checkpoint, you make an asylum claim, we just let you in. We give you basically this automatic parole status to allow you to come into the country. Well, President Trump has basically decided this is an insane policy, which
it is. They've shut down the CVP one app. So now the question is for those people who've been sort of released into the United States, what is their status? Do they have their court dates set up any more? Or are they going to be just shipped back? And this is the thing that there's some sort of whiplash that this is the one aspect of this where I somewhat feel bad for people who come and came into
the country illegally. Here are all these this population of people who is given this green light, come on in and they expend tons of time, energy, money, this humongous shift in their whole lives to come to a foreign country, and now within four years a whiplash totally the other way, where now they're going to live in this somewhat powerless non legal status awaiting possible deportation. I mean, there's a
it's a bizarre sort of whiplash for those individual people. Now, I'm not going to say that every single one of these individual people deserve our pity or our concern. One of the things I've heard from a friend of mine who does immigration law stuff is the role that cartels
can play in getting people to the border. That in his assessment, for any person the car, for any person who's getting to the border to be picked up by the border patrol, they have to pay off the cartel about twenty five hundred bucks to get over the border undetected. The cartel makes like twelve thousand bucks. That's his assessment, not mine. I'm not saying that's the gospel truth necessarily, but I mean he knows a lot more about this
than I do. So, you know, here are people actively funding Mexican drug cartels and the cartels playing an active role in facilitating people getting over the border. And by the way, you've got to think that this is somehow you know, the drug cartels are what are they? They are cartels for drugs. You gotta think this is contributing to or part of the flow of narcotics into the United States. So I'm not gonna act as though I'm crying big alligator tears for every single individual person involved.
But there is some real, genuine whiplash with all of this, and I guess my hope, my prayer for the Trump administration, I want deportations. I want the application of American law to be done in a way that's just and fair. I want the priority first and foremost obviously to be on anyone who's here who had a criminal record in Mexico or or there, whatever their home country was, whom we never would have allowed into the country in the first place, or anyone who's committed any crime here. Get
them out. I guess my concern is that there are real when you get rid of the criminals and you shove them aside, there are people who are in the country who were here under some kind of cover of law, some kind of colorable legal claim that they thought they were allowed to come here. And this is maybe the biggest injustice of the Biden administration policy. Why did you let these people in? Why did you let these people
in with this perilous legal status. When you know American immigration policy ping pong's back and forth between Republicans and Democrats every four years. At the very least, the greater justice of the Republican sort suite of policies is it's just letting people know, don't get involved in this on the front end, because we're you know, you're gonna be in a perilous state if you come here, you're gonna be living in fear of deportation. Don't come in illegally.
The door is shut. You want to come in, you come through a legal process, but the door is otherwise shut. No more abuse of the asylum system. You want to try and make an asylum claim, you got to remain in Mexico, but we're not. The door is not open. And that's actually the Trump administration saying that on the front end. There's actually a far greater justice in that because it deters people from trying to get in in
the first place. One of the things the Border Patrol has been reporting, just in this first you know, we're not even a full week into the Trump administration. One of the things they're reporting is a massive decrease in the number of counters they're having with potential illegal aliens. The message. You know, everyone knows what Trump Everyone in the Western hemisphere knows what it means when Donald Trump selected the illegal immigration door is closed, don't try it.
And that's a lot of it is. There is a closing of the door. But at the same time, I guess this is my fear. And you know, you might say John's a softy liberal. John's not hardcore. All right, John is a softy liberal and he's not hardcore. I dislike, I strongly don't want to see family separations in ways
that are unjust. I don't want to see people who came into the country, perhaps illegally, have had a difficult time, with chaotic lives whatever, getting themselves a kind of stable immigration status, who maybe have had kids here, have lived here for years and years and years living in fear of being rounded up by the border patrol. Sorry, I
just don't like that. I think that the whiplash effect of different administrations signaling different things, and people making large scale lifestyle decisions, people with people who don't speak our language in some cases, who don't one hundred percent understand what's going on. People who have been at various points lied to who came into the country on the basis of those representations now having to live in fear who are otherwise law abiding. I don't know how many people
that is, but it's not enough. It's not enough. And knowing the number of people I do who work with various kinds of lower income persons and work with farm workers and things like that, I don't want these people to live in fear. I hate the whole system of
how our illegal immigration has set up. I hate the false liberal compassion to say that having this permanent subclass of illegal, cheap labor who work in our service industries under the fear of being deported, that that is somehow better than having Americans work those jobs, that that is somehow better than having strict border enforcement. It is not fair, it is not just, It is not right. I mean,
it reminds me of the helots in ancient Sparta. Ancient Sparta was in many ways an incredibly unjust society, sort of five hundreds four hundreds pc Sparta. It was one of the major city states of ancient Greece. It was
fought against Athens. Sparta had this city near it, I think it was called Messenia, and they made the citizens of that region into a permanent class of slaves, the helots whom they subjugated and made them into the sort of their permanent slave class for decades, decades, decades, decades, permanently. Is that what we want with Latino immigration into this country.
I don't want. I don't think that is just. And that is basically how liberals have said, Well, they're doing the jobs Americans don't want to do, so we should permanently have this subclass. Even with the H one B visa issue. Okay, you know why employers like H one B visa employees rather than American employees. One you can pay them less. Two if you fire them, they get deported. If you fire an American, or you you lay off an American or an American's unhappy with their job, they
can just go work somewhere else. And H one B visa holder if they get fired, they go back to India. So they're not going to complain about anything. I mean, it's this wildly unjust system where here you've got someone here on an H one B visa who's like, oh, I'm not going to complain about any The employer can be doing all kinds of unjust, unfair practices, and their h one B visa employee will just sit there meekly
and take it. Your illegal immigrant dishwasher is not going to complain about an owner, you know, skimming money or whatever. Why because he's afraid he'll get deported if he speaks up about anything bad happening. So it's a wildly unjust system. And people who have been brought here have been brought into this unfair, unjust system in many cases on the basis of representations from this country. Yeah, maybe it was
on the basis of Joe Biden's representations. So I guess I'm just nervous about the human toll of all this. Do I want criminal illegal aliens to port it? Yes, yesterday. It's shockingly evil how the Biden administration sort of allowed
this to come about. But I also can't sit here and act like, you know, total mass deportation of everyone with a non legal status is necessarily a good thing, particularly when you're talking about people who made large scale family arrangements in relative good faith on the basis of our country representing things a certain way to them when we return. It's the fifty second anniversary of Rov Wade a quick thought on that on the John Girardi Show.
Just a quick thought. Earlier this week, on the twenty second, was the fifty second anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and there have been some pro lifers. You know, today as the National March, was the National March for Life in Washington, d C. Tomorrow is the Big Walk for Life West Coast. I'm going up there with a bus full of supporters. Some people have said, why are we having all these pro life marches still on January twenty second. ROV Wade
is overturned. Well, ROV Wade is overturned. As a question of constitutional law, abortion is not legal. Abortion is not part of the fundamental law of the United States of America. However, January twenty second represents a massive cultural, ethical, moral shift in this country for the worse, and as such, I think it deserves to be remembered with sorrow and penance. So that legacy of Roe is still with us. A
million children still being aboarded every year. That'll do it, John Giordy Show, See next time on Power Talk