I was going to write about the LATimes op-ed by Ethan Rarik, acting director of the Center on Politics at the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (echoed by Mark Kleiman) that would gladly sacrifice my rights as a California voter to the well-being of the Democratic Party.

I was pretty outraged when Rarik wrote:

The big problem with Proposition 77, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ballot measure to create a new system for drawing legislative and congressional boundaries, is that it’s much too fair.

…
Here’s why. I’m a Democrat, and while I don’t think that the nonpartisan redistricting would have much of an effect on the legislative majorities in the California statehouse (where Democrats are likely to keep control of both the Assembly and the Senate), I do think a nonpartisan redistricting could reduce the number of Democrats in California’s congressional delegation, lessening the chances that Democrats will ever be able to regain control of the House of Representatives.

If enacted, Proposition 77 would also rob California’s dominant Democrats of the power to dictate a partisan gerrymander after the 2010 census. I want Democrats to retain that ability, no matter how unseemly it is to say so. It’s not that I don’t want to be fair. I do. But why should California Democrats be fair to Republicans when they have no guarantee that Republicans in the rest of the country will behave likewise? I will support a nonpartisan redistricting of Democrat-dominated California on the same day I can be assured of similar fairness in Republican states.

Why am I outraged? Because Rarik is perfectly prepared to screw all California citizens rather than lose his partisan advantage. It’s not that we’re all in the same boat; it’s that he’d rather sink the boat than risk losing.

California politics is paralyzed (which is why we elected another B-movie star and keep doing these propositions) because we’ve institutionalized gridlock. Partisan gerrymandering has rendered the general election meaningless for legislators; the primary is what counts. And since the committed partisans – typically the most ideologically pure – control the levers of the local and state parties, the primaries are won by the most ideologically pure.

That’s why Brad Plumer’s criticism – while at least morally sound – is still off target.

This looks dubious. Under the second guideline there, the judges drawing the boundaries could end up packing the majority of urban voters into a few concentrated, ultra-Democratic districts. (The first guideline might, equally, pack Republicans into conservative “counties,” but I can’t tell without data, and am guessing this would be a smaller effect.) Schwarzenegger’s plan wouldn’t necessarily lead to more competitive districts either, as is widely hoped. Since “[j]udges must maximize the number of whole cities in each district,” you’d have a handful of ultra-safe single-city seats that would vote overwhelmingly Democratic. If you wanted more electoral competition, then you’d try to create a bunch of districts that, say, combined parts of “blue” urban areas with parts of “red” suburbs. Schwarzenegger’s plan does the exact opposite.

Now his plan would give representatives more “natural” regions to represent (i.e., it makes sense to represent a whole city rather than parts of two different regions), but that’s a different goal from either a) ensuring competitiveness or b) making sure that voters have anything like proportional representation in Congress, and should be sold as such. Plus it looks for all the world like a naked, calculated power grab, rather than a solid reform that just happens to hurt the Democrats. (I’d happily support the latter; not so much the former.)

The issue to Brad is that how many seats have a -D or a -R behind them is not only a consequence of fairness but is the primary metric of fairness. That seems senseless to me; I’m a Democrat, but I’m a Californian first.

The goal ought to be seats in which the ideologically pure are less likely to triumph. In which the compromisers, the folks who don’t think ‘moderation’ is a dirty word, have a chance to win.

I’m not at all sure I buy Plumer’s point that breaking district lines at existing political boundaries creates clear Democratic and Republican enclaves. I am sure that these will be less ‘ideologically pure’ than the gerrymandered seats we live with today – and thus that we will get more legislators who are familiar with the art of compromise. I’m equally sure that there is a way to model districts that would optimize the electoral balance between parties. But I’m equally sure that it would be incomprehensibly complex and opaque, and so as subject to manipulation as the BCS rankings.

Districts that reflect existing political boundaries are transparent and hard to manipulate; that’s a good thing.

I’ll be voting for Proposition 77; I’d like to bring actual politics back to California politics. Maybe we can start here and spread it around the country.

Update: Corrected the spelling of Brad Plummer’s name.