I’m working on a series on the California initiatives, but wanted to point out some great news that I just saw on Dan Weintraub’s site (you ought to read it all the time if you live in CA):
Schwarzenegger just endorsed Prop. 62, the open primary initiative. But he also took a much more important step for the long run. He offered a full-throated endorsement for reforming the way legislators draw district lines, and taking that power out of the hands of elected officials. He says he will be challenging the Legislature to put a reform initiative on the ballot. He doesn’t say when, but I hope he means next year, in a special election. It’s silly to let legislators pick their voters, when it should be the other way around. If Schwarzenegger can change that, he will truly deserve the reformist governor credentials he seeks.
I think that hyperpartisanship and entrenched incumbency caused in large part by gerrymandering is one of the worst features of our political system – even worse than the way the money gets raised (remember ‘Big Daddy’ Unruh’s quote? “If you can’t eat their food, drink their liquor, [have Biblical knowledge of] their [women of ill-repute] and take their money and STILL vote AGAINST them, you
don’t belong in this business“).
I’ve railed against gerrymandering in the past, and will do so as often and loudly as I can.
Update: moderated language so WoC doesn’t get killed in kiddie filters…
A.L.
As fourth Gen Californian I can totally agree with your sentiments re: Gerrymandering.
However, even tho’ most would probably consider me to be a charter member of the VRWC, I have to disagree with the Governor regarding 62, I can see no benefits from this stop gap piece of legislation trying to undo the court’s decisions re: Prop 198. Truly, 62 disenfranchises the concept of the two party system.
Now, I leap upon my favorite CA soapbox.
Gerrymandering, Unruh, and his inheritors in the Assembly were all created and empowered by the Warren Court’s “One Man, One Vote” decision in the late 60’s.
Prior to that, CA had a Federal style bicameral legislature, the Assembly based on population and the Senate, one per County. Under this system Pat Brown was able to grow the CA infrastructure, education establishment and other benchmarks of a growing state to Nation leading prominence.
However, since the Senate has become population based, the State has steadily spiraled into chaos. Without the brake of the more conservative counties on the metropolitan liberals everything turned Lewis Carrol like, see “The Jabberwocky”!
Many blame Prop. 13 for the decline, I think they’re as wrong as those who blame “illegal” immigration for the State’s ills.
As WoC posters says:
That’s all, I’m done now.
Mike
I’ll take Arnold seriously on gerrymandering when he takes the case to Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Those states are gerrymandered by his party just as bad as (probably worse than) California is by Democrats.
Otherwise, we’re playing a badly fixed game, running everything nice and fair where we’re in the majority, and getting totally screwed where we aren’t. Unless you can show me a place Arnold pushed anti-gerrymandering against his own party’s interest, I’m not one teensy bit interested. Or as they say on the playground, “You first.”
[My quixotic reform, BTW, is converting the State Senate to proportional representation with slates elected statewide.]
Andrew, can you put down the partisan looking-glass just for ten minutes? Or is it welded to your hand?
I’ll take progress wherever I can get it.
A.L.
I’d say this isn’t entirely partisan looking-glass. There’s a real parallel here between this and the winner-take-all system for sending electors.
To wit, I support a division of a state’s electors based proportionally on the votes from that state. I’m also generally inclined towards the Democratic party, and I live in California. I would thus strongly resist a move to make California’s electors not winner-take-all, because this would effectively be ceding every Presidential election to the Republicans. Were I a Republican in Texas, I’d feel exactly the same way.
As it happens, I still think the actual move here is a good one, because of two differences between these cases: gerrymandering is intrinsically Bad while winner-take-all electors are not; and that this will make individual legislature seats insecure, thus (hopefully) making individual members more responsive (irrespective of party affiliation).
However, it’s not clear that these are universally convincing enough to be able to dismiss “the opposition still does it that way” out of hand.
Michael, when the electoral college is, in essenced, eliminated (either by eliminating it or moving to proportional selection of electors) how much clout do you think Montana and Vermont will have in the Presidential election?
The President will be selected in the major media-covered population centers of the country…
A.L.
A.L., wouldn’t you agree that bilateral reduction in strategic nuclear weapons is a good thing while unilateral disarmament is so kooky that even most of the Chomsky fringe doesn’t believe in it?
Excuse me, but anti-gerrymandering plans that cost 10 Democratic seats in California while doing nothing about equally outrageous pro-Republican apportionment in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida is unilateral disarmament, not any sort of progress, unless you count progress towards making America effectively a one-party state. What do we do the day after? Take our further-shrunken minority status to Tom DeLay, professional exterminator, and say, “Oh, pretty please, won’t you let us have some House seats back in Texas? Look how fair and non-partisan we are now.”? He might just laugh himself to death. Appeasement doesn’t work, remember?
Kevin Drum put it just the same way.
The Texas one, of course, reversed an equally egregious pro-Democrat gerrymander that had previously been in. Both parties do it equally.
Perhaps at least starting with state legislative districts would help? Can we at least agree on that?
A.L., FWIW, this just in, Arnold “has endorsed Prop. 71”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/10/18/state1935EDT0179.DTL on stem-cell research. People have had some doubts about funding it with state money but with the Reagan family in support …
BTW, one reason Arnold had was that, according to the Chronicle article, his father-in-law, Sargent Shriver, may have Alzheimer’s.
Yeah, I saw that and winced. Sorry, when we don’t have enough water systems for our population (or the sewer systems to get rid of it once we use it), I have a hard damn time thinking about spending $3B on basic research.
A.L.
As for gerrymandering, I think its worth the risk to reform it in California even if it might cost the Democrats a few seats. For one thing, it might gain the Democrats a few seats as well. The post-2000 gerrymandering in California was deeply, deeply corrupt, with incumbents of both parties agreeing to pad their own seats with extra majorities. And I’m not too fond of the Sacramento Democrats after their performance the past few years. Though perhaps the reason they’re so bad is another foolish “reform”, term limits, which has resulted in legislators auditioning for lobbyists jobs the minute they get elected, and with voters having nobody to hold accountable.
Prop 62, if I understand it correctly, would allow voters to cross party lines in primaries (good), but would also result in libertarian/green/small parties not being allowed on the General election ballot. (not so good) I’ll probably vote for it, but it seems like a waste of time to me. Instant Runoff Voting would be a real reform I think would make a difference.
Prop 71 seems like a pretty good idea to me.
What is there was a law forbidding them to become lobbyists a set number of years after having served in the legislature? Would that be legal?
Well, My guess is that you could forbid ex-legislators from lobbying on the floors of the house and senate, but you probably couldn’t prevent them from making phone calls, and you probably wouldn’t be able to change the fact that legislators who had done the bidding of the special interests would get better jobs on leaving office than those who hadn’t.
Andrew J. Lazarus,
Fair enough; I’ll take you seriously, in turn, when you realize that Arnold is actually governer of only one state, and it’s not any of those you mentioned.
Kirk, I believe Arnold is permitted to address citizens of other states (e.g., at a political convention). He is even allowed to say “I am calling on the State Legislature of Florida to introduce the same legislation” while sitting in his Sacramento office. He doesn’t, and you don’t want him to, for the very simple reason that you both wish to play “Heads I Win Tails You Lose”. Like Kevin Drum, I’d like more competitive elections, but if it’s only Democrats who are endangered under the new rules, well: No, thank you.
I had serious doubts about Ahnold as governor simply because I’m not really thrilled about the idea of actors as politicians. But Ahnold is looking a lot better than Reagan turned out to be.
Opposition to anti-gerrymandering efforts is the most short sighted politcal gamesmanship I can imagine. Gerrymandering fosters uncontested safe seats that are inhabited by career politicians who end up being bought by special interest groups. Even term limits seem only to be an up or out system like the military uses that swing more power to the special interest groups who see that their most loyal lap dogs get rewarded with the next post up the ladder. Corruption and malfeasance are inevitable as officeholders need not fear retribution at the ballot box. For the same reason, extremists who pander to the hardcore party faithful get a soap box they never would if they had to justify their comments to a balanced electorate.
And who suffers? Primarily the consumers of state services, in California school children. If Hiram Johnson were to return to California today, he would wonder how the Southern and Union Pacific had morphed into the CTA and Prison Gurads’ Union.
Any step to reduce gerrymandering in California can only help Californians served by the State. If Texans want to maintain the corrupt system after the Governator shows an alternative can work, they will pay for their stupidity, not Californians.
Ultimately, this is one California innovation that will sweep the nation if done well, or at least better than the California energy de-regulation brought to you by corrupt Democrats and Republicans. And if it does, that could benefit Democrats more than Republicans, given current trends. Those oposing it are not only anti-democracy but short sighted in the extreme.
Andrew, I’m sorry, but I’m an American and a Californian first, and a Democrat second. I’m sorry that you feel otherwise…
A.L.
OK, here’s one Californian that would like to talk about 71 and 62. I coincidentally dug out the voter ‘flyer’ (tome, more like) on Sunday and started going through the props.
71 is a NO for me. If it was just an assurance that stem cell research would stay legal in CA, I’d vote YES eagerly. But it wants to take bond funded public money from a state that’s broke, and use it as a venture fund. I do know a little about the last – though I’m not a biotech investor – so I did a little checking. I got 24 hits running ‘stem cell’ against the VentureSource database. I got 58 hits (some probably duplicates) running it against my own e-mail stash of investor letters. That’s likely a large underestimate of the number of startups actually working in the area – with such a long lead time being in ‘stealth’ is quite common. It also completely disregards the internal activities of existing pharma and biotech companies, and privately funded research occuring at universities. It doesn’t look to me like there’s a shortage of capital out there. I also wonder how some of the VCs backing this would react when and if that state fund, with its politically mandated disclosure requirements, wanted into one of their deals….
I’m undecided on 62. I’m 100% behind the comments re gerrymandering and the decay of the California parties. I also applaud the Governator for speaking out on this, and I’m backing an R candidate for assembly up here in the Bay Area – Steve Poizner – who has made this one of his focus issues. (Fairly gutsy to do so with such a wonky issue.) But, I’m having trouble with that spectre of having two leftist wankers as my electoral choice, though granting it might not be too much worse than choosing between a moonbat and paleocon, which is what I often have now. I entirely agree with the overall issue – not sure this is the way to take care of it. Someone want to try and argue me off the fence?
One of the problems with the old legislative setup was that having a State Senate on a county-by-county basis was that it was already skewing state representation by the 1930s. Can you imagine a state senate now where Alpine County’s 2,000-or-so voters have the same representation as LA County’s 8M?
And we do have to have US Congressional districts by representative apportionment anyway, so it sort of made sense, at least before each State Senator (of 40) now represents more constituents, each, than our 54 US Representatives.
Trouble is, with apportionment, Prop. 62 becomes even more problematic. And it has to do with the experience of cross-filing — other Californians chime in on this. In that old system, a candidate could file on multiple ballots but if he lost his own party’s nomination, he couldn’t run. He could, however, by cross-filing, milk votes from another candidate and trip him up. It was what froze the state into a Republican ice age. It could do the same thing now in a Democratic state. Prop. 62 isn’t cross-filing per se, but as I read it, it could have the same result: no GOP or Green candidates on my ballot in the 3rd Senate District, but two Democrats.
Certainly, given that so many Assembly and Senate districts are heavily Democratic or Republican, it could make them completely uncompetitive, and give us, essentially, two primaries where the party activists compete to see who can be more partisan.
Not a good idea. I agree that the state apportionment system is crummy, but 62 would only make things worse.
“One of the problems with the old legislative setup was that having a State Senate on a county-by-county basis was that it was already skewing state representation by the 1930s. Can you imagine a state senate now where Alpine County’s 2,000-or-so voters have the same representation as LA County’s 8M?”
You have the same phenomenon in the US Senate. Just state by state no county by county. I believe it’s an important thing for there to be proportional representation as well as equal representation.
The national Senate is a different case – there were (and are, IMO) good Constitutional reasons for balancing among large and small states.
It just worries me that 62 is turning the wrong knobs on the process. If the root of the issue is partisan gerrymandering – and I suspect it is – why not target that? Why not (as a for instance) stick some algorithms people in a room and have them come up with objective minimum criteria for compactness and convexity of the population distribution in a legislative district? (Look it up.) Or even a fully automated procedure that optimizes that criteria across the entire state to get district layout? Yeah, it’s wonky, but it might actually work if you can get it out of the hands of the partisan hacks. It’s not like we’re living in the 19th century with paper census forms anymore – something akin to what I’m suggesting is common practice for siting retail establishments.
Or if we can actually get electronic voting to be credible (a whole ‘nother topic…) why not go to Aussie ballot? Put up a reasonably tough percentage of voters in the last election that have to sign a nominating petition, and let people go at it?
To lindsey, yes I was thinking of that when I wrote it, the US Senate does confer a certain disproportion. However, that’s spread over a much larger country and the demographic extremes aren’t as … well as extreme. “The California registration statistics”:http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ror/county_09_03_04.xls show 812 registered voters in Alpine County, which is also tiny in square mileage, vs. 5.6M registered in LA County, an area whose topology and demographics are far more diverse.
I’m not sure, since my field is law rather than math, whether that’s as disproportionate as the “difference between”:http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank01.xls California’s 35M and Wyoming’s 501,000 populations.
Problem with 62 is that it would skew the primary process in districts — 40 Senate, 80 Assembly — that have already been gerrymandered into absurdity. Take my district, 6th Assembly, where the winner of the 2000 Democratic primary was first in a field of 9 or so with 21% of the vote, hence, an easy win against the (nominal) GOP candidate in November. (And given the advantages of incumbency, there’s been no contest in 2002 or 2004).
If 62 was in place that year, as I read it, we would have had two Democrats — one moderate, one somewhat liberal — and no GOP or Green opposition, which would have afforded more meaningful votes but less ideological spread.
And this in a district that sent GOP assemblymen (albeit progressive GOP) till 1992.
My party (D) might benefit on paper from 62 but I really don’t want to have elections where the main issue is how obscurantist the winner can be. Besides, having minor candidates running can mean that there’ll always be someone to razz them in debate during the general election, even if the local GOP doesn’t.
Under the Federal Constitution, the states are sovereign entities, and can therefore be represented as such in the Senate. Under state constitutions, the counties are cities are creatures of the state, not independent and sovereign entities, and cannot be represented. This is why both Assembly and Senate are one-person one-vote institutions.
AL’s comment that he is an American and Californian first and a Democrat second is one of the reasons I respect him and his fellow travelers so much. Do the right thing, even if it hurts, and use it as an example to get others to do the right thing. If doing the right thing helps your party, it proves your party is in the right place. If it hurts your party, maybe your party should adjust itself. This is the glory of the marketplace of ideas. Gerrymandered districts help out partisan extremists in both parties. Balanced districts lead to more competitive elections. Competition good, extremism bad.
Don’t know if I’ll vote for the proposition, but I support the idea.
AL, I think you’re being very unfair to Andrew. The bottom line, is gerrymandering, etc are process issues. We come down on one side or the other on these process issues because we believe they will ultimately lead to better policy outcomes. Andrew’s argument is that right now, in the world as it is and not as we wish it to be, fixing gerrymandering in California but not in other states will lead to *worse* policy outcomes, not better ones. There is nothing “unpatriotic” about his argument.
IMO, one of the real problems with American politics is that the media elites and the “nonpartisan” Mcainiac goo-goos have been foolishly obssessing on these not-very-important process issues while being unwilling, for whatever reason, to focus and take a stand on the *real* policy issues and *real* policy outcomes.
Roublen Vesseau makes one of the most dangerous arguments I’ve seen; that if the results of the process are not the ‘right’ policy as he/she sees it, then it is the process that is at fault. This is the path to the one-party state, with dissidents in the asylum because only a crazy person would oppose the policies of the party in power.
Democracy is the opposite – that the right process selects the right people and they produce the right policy. If we don’t like the policy we can try to adjust it by working within the system, not by changing the system to get the results we want. A critical element of this is accepting the other side when it wins.
This is one of the reasons I want to see the Democrats take back the House. The Republicans have been in power long enough, and have grown very arrogant. It’s time for them to live in the wilderness of power for a while. A fairly frequent change of who is in power is a good way for everyone to learn tolerance.
Argue for an honest process that is fair today, and tomorrow, and next decade, and after that. Don’t support a process for the sake of giving your side power at this moment.
Democracy is unlikely to produce the right policy. That is why the founders carefully constructed a design that was a balance of Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy and carefully insulated decisionmaking powers from the mood of the moment by intricate checks and balances. What Democracy provides above all is legitimacy. Everyone gets a voice in and shares responsibility for the government.
Iowa has used a non-partisan commission to draw electoral districts and by all accounts this has worked very well.
I think 62 is a really bad idea a it further erodes party identification for legislators and makes them even more independent agents who will need the resourcs that only lobbyists or the like can provide. Look at the corruption of Louisianna politics or the corruption and factionalism of Japan which uses multimnember districts. When hte fundamental poliitcal competition is between members of a party rather than across party lines you get factionalim based on personal loyalty and the corruption and pork barreling that this introduces as faction leaders need resources to attract clients.
If liberal Republicans and moderate Democrats are upset with the current system they need to fight for control of the county committees and invest their time in building up a politcal base and attract primiray voters and not trying to introduce these hairbrained schemes to get rid of political parties.
One might see a trail followed to be safe, even if that trail leads to a cliff. Whether this cliff or the next, stacis is not mobile, nor efficient. What we do not know can not hurt us, what we can not solve may well.
Rik
A.L., is it such a great idea as an American for you to give Tom DeLay ten more seats in Congress? Will Californians be better off in any visible way, or only by feeling so much better about themselves? At least you don’t pretend that DeLay will be so overwhelmed by your goodness as to return the favor. (I support simultaneous and bipartisan renunciation of gerrymandering.)
Your comment, although you surely don’t see it, comes from the same sanctimonious, self-indulgent, self-righteous “I’ll get a better score than you in heaven” place as Barbara Lee’s refusal to endorse force against the Taliban. In Barbara Lee’s world, Osama is walking happy and free but we haven’t sullied our hands with civilian deaths. In your world, Tom DeLay and the Republican Party are in permanent control of the US House of Representatives, but you haven’t sullied your hands with gerrymandering. Thanks loads.
Andrew, charitably, bullshit. My state government is imploding under the weight of a political system that has been gamed for partisan advantage – for the noblest reasons, I’m sure – for the twenty five years that I’ve been paying attention.
I’m sure it’ll be great to know that as the institutions of government collapse into irrelevance that the guys at the wheel were on our side; personally I’ll avoid the situation if at all possible. If that means I don’t get all the policies I want, tough. Politics is a long-term game and I’ll be around for a while.
The system is going to collapse exactly because of attitudes like yours (and Tom DeLay’s and Newt Gingrich’s). Well I’m not gonna play that way anymore. And – based on watching the video of the Jon Stewart/Crossfire bit, there’s at least an audience of people who are right there with me.
Want to excommunicate me? Rock on.
A.L.
Hear, hear! Take back the middle!
Oh, and Andrew, unless you’re moving to CA, sod off – you don’t vote here.
Tim, I’ve voted in CA for over twenty years (including three living overseas by Federal Absentee Ballot). You must have me confused with someone else.
A.L., my one last comment on this thread is that I didn’t see Jon Stewart calling for the unilateral and unreciprocated gift of 10 House seats to the Republican Party, because he didn’t make any such call. Your high-mindedness will make a bad situation worse.
Apologies for the incorrect snide remark. So, are you happy enough with the choices you find on the ballot to just let it go? (I’m now leaning against 62, but the Governator’s right on principle.)