Redistricting Commission tries to repeal One Person, One Vote
In one of its first acts, the new Citizens Redistricting
Commission has decided to ignore the United States and California Constitutions
by in effect repealing the historical "one person one vote" rule that has been
law in America for 47 years.
They did this by telling their staff to draw districts that
will clearly violate constitutional population standards. This is so their final maps can over
represent liberal areas of California that are losing population, such as Los
Angeles and the Bay Area, and then under represent the more conservative inland
areas of California that are growing.
In his famous "one person – one vote" ruling in 1964, Chief
Justice Earl Warren said this was unconstitutional. "Legislators represent people, not trees or
acres; legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities." This is the heart of equal representation,
districts must be equally populated. No
one questioned this for 47 years until the Commission voted to ignore it last
Thursday night.
Corrupting the Redistricting Commission, Part II
The Citizens Redistricting Commission is taking a page from Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling and incompetent French detective in the Pink Panther movies whose crime investigations always suffer from his own ineptitude. After a corrupt process of selecting a line drawing specialist which I detailed in my post last week, it now turns out that the law firm they hired as their Voting Rights Act “experts” is equally tainted.
The law creating this commission is quite specific: Section 8253 of the Government Code provides: “The commission shall require that at least one of the legal counsel hired by the commission has demonstrated extensive experience and expertise in implementation and enforcement of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. Sec 1971 ff).”
The commission put out bids in order to engage a firm to do this. The choice narrowed down to two well known law firms, Nielsen Merksamer and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. But then Nielsen Merksamer was conflicted out because it is a “lobbying firm” (not unusual for public law firms). I wrote at the time that the real agenda here was to hire as VRA counsel one George H. Brown who served with Commissioner Maria Blanco on the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, a far left bunch of activist attorneys who pass their time with immigrant asylum issues and assuring convicted felons the right to vote. Brown was part of the Gibson Dunn bid along with well known Republican attorney Daniel Kolkey.
Corrupting the Redistricting Commission
The Citizens Redistricting Commission, built upon a hopeful ideal of enhancing political competition in legislative and congressional districts, has now descended into a cesspool of corruption, and the promise of fair new districts has been compromised by brutal partisan politics instigated by the commission itself.
At its Sacramento meeting last weekend, the commission was given a
chance to choose for the vital project of actually drawing the new districts
two firms, each of whom had ties to past partisan activities. Ignoring the
need for political balance in its line drawing, the commission chose a firm
with, in the words of Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters,
"indirect but unmistakable ties to Democrats."
This firm is called Q2 Data and Research, based in Berkeley and
headed by Karin MacDonald, who also heads the Statewide Database, the census
and political data bank for use in redistricting. The political tie to the
Democrats comes from Professor Bruce Cain, an owner of Q2, who started the
database when he worked as chief consultant for Assembly Democrats in the
1981 redistricting.
Can Republicans hold one-third of the legislature?
My friend, colleague and former boss Doug Jeffe opines in the Friday Fox and Hounds that the Republicans should be reasonable on the tax vote because this may be the last time they have one third in the legislature, and thus the ability to affect policy. Doug seems to think the Democrats are pretty much guaranteed to increase their numbers through redistricting.
While it is certainly possible that the Republicans could blow their one third of the legislature (they might, for example, hire Mike Murphy, late of the Whitman campaign, as their chief strategist), Doug would do well to remember Lincoln’s sage advice: the hen is the wisest of all creatures for it does not cackle until the egg is laid.
Now that we have the final redistricting population figures, and in fact this egg might not be laid at all. Given that the Citizens Redistricting Commission will draw the lines and they will have to follow strict criteria, here’s what we know for sure:
Predicting the Redistricting Map – How the Republicans will be Screwed
Predicting the map is always fun. Even though the final census figures are not
out yet, people can and are drawing new legislative and congressional districts
for California. One of the more
interesting is the work of "Silver Spring" a Democratic activist from Maryland
with a knack for numbers.
In 2010, prior to the passage of Proposition 20, he draw a
highly partisan gerrymander of California’s 53 congressional districts that he
said would result in the election of 46 Democrats and seven Republicans to
congress, a loss of 12 Republicans from the current delegation. That won’t happen with the Citizens
Redistricting Commission doing the job.
So Silver Spring has drawn a new map with nice compact
districts that employs racial gerrymandering to cut out Republicans. His argument, a very legitimate one, is that
the Commission will be pressured by outside groups to maximize Latino
districts, given the huge growth in Latino population in the past decade.
The Tax Extension Election: Why it’s an Uphill Battle
The voters may have a simple way of resolving the state budget crisis: do away with state government. That’s a conclusion you can take from an unusual survey of opinions on government conducted for California Forward by Viewpoint Learning and released last week.
The survey looked at voter opinions of the various levels of government. Virtually without exception, respondents had more faith in local government to fix problems than state government. But neither level did particularly well. The survey asked how good a job STATE government was doing making California a good place to live: 21 percent said excellent or good; 75 percent said fair or poor. When asked about LOCAL government, the numbers were 36 percent excellent and good; 60 percent fair and poor.
When given 12 factors that kept state government from working well, too much “bureaucracy, waste and fraud” ranked first with 72 percent saying this was a big problem. It was followed by “political leaders don’t listen to regular people” (67 percent) and “elected officials aren’t held accountable for their action” (66 percent).
Cuts? Yes. Tax Increase? Only if it’s on someone else.
The first survey on the Gov. Jerry Brown budget plan is now out and it has some interesting findings. The Public Policy Institute of California released the survey on Thursday.
According to the PPIC, some 58 percent of Californians are satisfied with the Brown budget approach of cuts and taxes; some 66 percent of likely voters favor the idea of a special election to prevent further budget cuts, but only 54 percent actually favor extending the 2009 tax increases that would be at the heart of the proposed June special election.
What are we to make of these figures? First, the $8 billion in specific budget cuts Brown has proposed would now seem in concrete. Democrats howled when former Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed similar cuts, but now that the cuts have Brown’s fingerprints on them, the howling has ceased. The $4 billion in funding shifts Brown has proposed would also seem to have general support.
The special election issue is more nuanced. First, the poll find voters very opposed to cuts in K-12 education and favoring cuts in prison spending. But, as PPIC points out, this may be based on an erroneous belief that prison spending is higher than spending on schools, when the facts are just the opposite. Only 10 percent of the budget goes to prison spending, nearly half to schools.
Let’s have a Clear Election on Taxes
Can Proposition 25 be used to place a tax increase on the June special election ballot? Joel Fox argues today (January 13) that it cannot. I think it can and should.
Proposition 25 allows the budget to be passed by a majority vote of the legislature. It does not change the requirement of a two thirds vote to increase taxes. Placing the question of increasing taxes before the voters is different; the voters not the legislature will be increasing taxes.
Gov. Brown is unwilling to cut the budget by $20 billion plus, the kind of cuts that are necessary to balance the budget without a tax increase. Instead he has a number of questionable cuts (like Medical that may depend on a favorable Supreme Court ruling) and Schwarzenegger-style funding shifts (like transferring First Five money and Proposition 63 money to the general fund).
And none of this will work without about $12 billion in additional revenues that Brown can only get by extending the 2009 car tax, sales tax and income tax increases. And that requires a vote of the people.
The Working Families Tax Increase
So Gov. Jerry Brown has bought into the Working Families Tax Increase. That’s the name that ought to be given to the extension of the 2009 tax increase that Brown is making part of his 2011 budget solution. His problem is that voters have already given it a good look, and said “no.”
In May 2009, then Gov. Schwarzenegger and legislature asked the voters to save a tax increase just passed as part of a February budget deal by extending $8 billion in new taxes to 2013. Republicans demanded a sweetener for putting the tax on the ballot; a complex “rainy day” fund that would limit future state spending.
Although both parties bought off on this ballot measure, Proposition 1A on the May 19, 2009 special election ballot, the voters did not. It lost by 30 points and failed to carry a single county. So now the tax increase expires this June, and that is what Brown wants to restore.
So why call it a Working Families Tax Increase? Look at what it does; the measure increases the state’s car tax from .65 percent of a vehicle’s value to 1.15 percent. It raises the state’s sale tax by one cent, to an average of about nine percent statewide. And it raises each personal income tax bracket by .25 percent. These tax increases are highly regressive; they are not based on ability to pay, especially the sales tax hike, and they fall hardest on working families.
Redistricting Gets Underway
This Wednesday, December 8, the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College, in conjunction with the California Target Book, will hold the first conference on the new Citizens Redistricting Commission, at the California Dental Association rotunda, 1201 K Street, 15th Floor, Sacramento, from 9:30 am to noon. The conference is free and open to the public.
The conference will provide a look at estimated populations for congressional and legislative districts that the Commission will use to draw new districts for California. It will also look at population shifts within the state, the criteria and open process the Commission must use, and the legal restraints the Commission will be under.
This conference follows the first meeting of the original eight members of the nonpartisan commission last week. This week, the initial commissioners will choose six additional members to fill out the full commission of five Democrats, five Republicans and four others.