California Gov. Gray Davis' minions are giving his opponent in the upcoming election plenty of fodder. While Davis asserts that GOP candidate Bill Simon hasn't voted in many previous elections, Davis is going to get in trouble because he's ignoring the votes made by Californians.

First, the State Board of Education is considering making changes to Proposition 227, also known as the Unz Initiative, which basically ended bilingual education in California. The initiative won 60.9 percent to 39.1 percent -- a landslide. The statute required all students to spend at least the first month of each school year in a classroom where English is the primary language. After that, parents are allowed to request a waiver, allowing their children to go back to a traditional bilingual education classroom. The theory was that if you are immersed in the language, you will pick it up much faster. I've had friends who have spent months down in Guatemala or Southern Mexico, who come back speaking fluent Spanish -- because that's all they heard every day for months. In fact, after several months they start thinking in Spanish. I was told by one person that it took them a week before they switched back to thinking in English after arriving in the U.S. For the first week they found themselves thinking in Spanish and then translating it to English.

English Immersion has apparently worked. Test scores for Latino students in English language classrooms have shot up, and those in traditional bilingual education have not.

So for a program that has been so successful, and is supported by so many Californians, what could cause it to be junked? Well, a liberal interest group. National Review Online's John Miller reports:

Now the state board of education, dominated by Davis appointees, would gut Prop. 227. Under current law, kids can get out of English-language classes only if their parents sign waivers. The state board, however, would give teachers the same authority. It would also delete the provision requiring that children spend the first month of each school year in English classrooms.

In short, the bilingual-ed establishment would have limited-English children back in its clutches, where it would condemn them to a mis-education lasting for years � and with consequences lasting for lifetimes. "The combination of these two changes would essentially reestablish California's system of bilingual education for 1.5 million immigrant students," wrote Unz in an e-mail last week.

The Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters weighed in too, long before former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan lost his bid for the GOP nomination.

Last week the board adopted regulations to implement Proposition 227, a 1998 ballot measure that seemingly settled the long-running debate by mandating English immersion for students not proficient in English and placing severe limits on bilingual instruction. And the board also dumped the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation as the defender of Proposition 227 in court and handed the case to Attorney General Bill Lockyer, which 227 backers say could lead to a back-door agreement to eviscerate the measure.

Riordan was a proponent, and financial backer, of Proposition 227, which garnered more than 60 percent of the vote in 1998, including about half of Latino voters. Davis strongly opposed it, although he insisted that he would not undermine what voters wrought. The state school board's actions now give Riordan an opening to allege that Davis is thwarting the voters' will.

Note that the majority of people on this board were appointed by Davis. Doesn't he have any control over them? Davis will have a hard time arguing that he is moderate and considerate of the will of the voters, when his appointees ignore what is often considered a landslide vote.

And it doesn't stop there. Despite paying lip service to the 61.4 percent of Californians who voted to for Prop. 22 that limited marriage in California to a woman and a man, Davis has spent the last two years doing everything he can to try to violate the spirit, but not the letter of the law. Walters, who knows Sacramento inside and out, has kept a close eye on Davis.

Two years after electing Davis governor, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriages. But with the Legislature's dominant Democrats moving leftward, and including more homosexual members, there's a clamor to expand the rights of same-sex couples, edging toward some form of legally recognized unions.

Davis has been playing both sides, continuing his public opposition to gay marriages while cultivating gay rights activists who are an important element of the Democratic Party. At one point, asked during an interview about his tolerance of judges who might disagree on gay marriage, Davis said: "If I appoint people who take contrary positions to the ones I expressed in my campaign -- and I made it very clear in the campaign I was opposed to same-sex marriages -- then democracies don't function."

Privately, Davis has told gay advocates that they'd have to be content with an incremental, go-slow approach that didn't invite a backlash from voters. But as his approval ratings sank last year, he edged leftward to consolidate his voter base in anticipation of a tougher-than-expected re-election battle and signed AB 25, the year's major gay rights bill.

Under the measure, signed in October, domestic partners received a flock of new rights, stopping just shy of Vermont's civil union law. Davis staged a public ceremony for the measure and declared it "about time" to expand gay rights.

Gray Davis is going to hit GOP candidate Bill Simon hard on abortion. And he'll win points that way, but if Simon can make a case out of Davis' disregard of the will of the voters time and time again -- he may be able to make some political points.