The Redistricting Commission’s Primary Failure
Dante condemned those who betray a public trust to the hottest place in hell. My candidate for Dante’ inferno this week is State Auditor Elaine Howle, who created the poll of candidates that formed the Citizens Redistricting Commission, now thankfully in its final weeks of existence.
Howle’s primary criterion was “racial diversity” in the pool, and not surprisingly the commissioners who emerged from her process made racial districting their primary goal. And now we have the final plans developed by this commission, and the product further Balkanizes California into racial enclaves. These lines will contribute to continued political polarization of this state, and will give us a legislature in the next decade less able to craft compromises and function as a deliberative body than the one we have now.
Race and ethnicity are difficult in California, a state with no racial/ethnic majority – far from it. And Latinos, who suffered from the 2001 gerrymander that denied them fair representation, deserved additional seats as this commission has created. But over the last month the commission has made race and ethnicity almost the only factors in its line drawing, and the final product can be accurately called a racial gerrymander.
Not Everyone Wins in Redistricting
Here’s a reminder, courtesy of the Rolling Stones, to the
various Californians already camped out on the courthouse steps in advance of
Friday’s presentation of the final redistricting maps:
Cue the music: "You can’t always get what you want."
Republicans, Democrats, blacks, Latinos, mayors, county
supervisors and local activists across the state already have complained that
the lines drawn by the new California Citizens Redistricting Commission, all
boiling down to a single beef: They just aren’t fair.
And the way to fix that problem, naturally, is to redraw the
lines so that my political party/ethnic group/city/county/neighborhood gets
what it wants, even if the other political party/ethnic group, etc., gets
screwed.
“Voluntary” LA Red-Light Ticket Fines should at least be Tax Deductable
The Los Angeles City Council voted yesterday to end the
red-light camera program, which apparently came with "voluntary" fines for traffic
violations. That’s right, "voluntary
fines."
It was revealed this week that violators do not have to pay
the tickets that arrived in the mail if a camera caught them making a traffic
light infraction. As the Los
Angeles Times put it:
"For a variety of reasons, including the way the law was
written, Los Angeles officials said the fines were essentially
"voluntary" and that there are virtually no tangible consequences for
those who refuse to pay."
Heck, you didn’t even need the services of the notorious
"Gold Card Desk," recently
revealed where politicians and others with connections at city hall could
get parking tickets dismissed quietly and cleanly.
Voter Imposed Term Limits Continue to Inconvenience the Political Class
Ever since the people of California, back in 1990, passed Proposition 140 and imposed term limits on California’s Constitutional officers and the State Legislature, there have been efforts promoted by political insiders to do away with those limits, or at least to weaken them. Many politicians and the people engaged directly with them find term limits to be an inconvenient insertion of the people’s will into what they prefer to be a Patrician process.
There has been an increased level of "chatter" amongst California’s elites as they have expressed their pleasure (especially newspaper editorial boards) at a new research paper released by the Center for Government Studies (CGS) that is critical of term limits for, among other reasons, not achieving the desired goal of proponents of creating a "citizen legislature" where ex-pols go back home to live under the laws they helped create, and also for causing a "dearth" of experience within the legislature.
The CGS study asserts that because many termed-out legislators tend to find other positions within government, that in doing so they do not actually return back to private life. With all due respect to CGS, I can name dozens of former legislators that I know of who actually have reached their term limits and are back home.
Stop AB 1062!
If you are not aware of AB 1062 by
Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, you should be. Mr. Dickinson has a long history in
public service, describes
himself as the leading progressive voice in Sacramento County,
and is a former personal injury lawyer. These facts make it unsurprising that
he authored AB 1062, which is sponsored by the Consumer Attorneys of
California (CAOC) and would eliminate arbitration agreements in nursing home
agreements.
Personal injury lawyers have long been opposed to
arbitration agreements and it is no surprise that they are trying to peel them
away industry by industry. While the California Supreme Court and the
Legislature have typically viewed arbitration as a very desirable alternative
to litigation because if its efficiency and fairness, personal injury lawyers
despise arbitration because it cuts them (and their ludicrously high fees) out
of the process. Nursing homes are one of the prime targets of personal injury lawyers,
and they want the ability to sue.