Author: Tony Quinn

Congratulations are in order to Assembly Speaker John Perez. The Redistricting Commission has now delivered the 54th seat necessary for Speaker Perez to achieve two-thirds Democratic rule in the Assembly, (an accomplishment the Democrats never achieved on their own). With a two-thirds vote, Perez and his friends can pass tax increases to their heart’s delight. They need not spend money trying to elect more Democratic members; the Redistricting Commission has done it for them.

It is all a matter of having friends in high places.

Their friends are not just the 14 commissioners, who feign ignorance of the partisan seats they are drawing – and that is true of some but not all of the commissioners. The real partisan work is being done by their staff of Berkeley Democratic consultants. Every change made to Assembly maps since release of the first draft districts on June 10 has favored the Democrats; to believe this is all by accident is to walk through an orchard and believe all the rows of trees just grew there by chance.

Running out of time, beset by rebellious consultants, and manipulated by partisans, the Citizens Redistricting Commission has decided to exclude citizens from the process. The Commission is going dark.

On Saturday, the Commission voted not to release a second set of draft redistricting maps to the press or the public on July 14 as promised. They also voted not to post maps of the districts they are drawing on their own redistricting website. Despite a $3 million budget and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to their consultants, the consultants told them they had no time for public maps. Outside groups are being recruited for that task.

Their line drawing staff also has announced that the Commission must be done with its directions by July 20; they will accept no more directions on districts after that — despite the fact it is three and a half weeks until the Commission is supposed to adopt its final maps. This will allow for no public input on the final maps since their staff will have stopped working. California will get whatever districts their consultants concoct over the next nine days — like it or not.

Since the release of their first sets of maps on June 10, and resultant uproar from communities that felt ill treated, the Commission has tied itself in knots over racial districting, redrawing the Los Angeles and Bay Area urban cores over and over, while giving the back of its hand to the rest of the state. For much of suburban and rural California, their new districts are far worse than anything the legislature ever drew.

The Friends of the African American Caucus don’t think highly of California Redistricting Commission Commissioner Connie Galambos Malloy. The Caucus wrote in their most recent posting:

“As millions of Americans put out their flags and fired up the grill to celebrate freedom and democracy over the 4th of July weekend, Commissioner Connie Galambos Malloy of the California Redistricting Commission fired a salvo at African American voters in Los Angeles as she penciled them out of their traditional community districts and hard fought political power.

“Malloy, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, committed her dastardly deeds with stealth and incredible disrespect for African American electoral participation, creating serpentine, meandering and totally nonsensical districts. This was done while most Californians were enjoying their holiday festivities and not paying attention to political intrigue. Was this intentional?”

The results are in and the first draft maps released by the Citizens Redistricting Commission on June 10 have bombed.  Over the past two weeks, Commission members have had to sit through hours of testimony on the maps while more than 1,000 of their fellow citizens told them what a lousy job they did.

The first maps achieved remarkable results.  First, they managed to violate the Federal Voting Rights Act by actually reducing the number of majority-minority districts in a state where Latinos accounted for 90 percent of net growth over the past decade.  The Commission now realizes this; they threw out their staff’s entire congressional work product for Los Angeles County and the commissioners themselves are now redrawing the districts.

Second, in place after place they managed to gerrymander the state even more than the legislature did in 2001 with a series of truly bonehead districts. Now that is a real trick, and here are just six examples of where they did a worse job than the politicians did ten years ago.

“These maps are a worst case scenario for the Latino community. The lines drawn by the Commission gerrymander Los Angeles Latinos into a district with the millionaires of Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades. These lines would disenfranchise Latinos by denying them a fair voice in the democratic process.” So says Arturo Vargas, redistricting expert with the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

What is this all about? Did the Arizona Legislature sneak into California and draw the new district lines released by the Redistricting Commission last week? Aren’t Latinos responsible for 90 percent of the net growth in California over the past decade? Is it possible a nonpartisan citizens commission could treat them so badly?

Well, Mr. Vargas is absolutely correct; California Latinos take it in the shorts in the Commission’s draft plans.

In assessing the impact of redistricting plans on minority groups, the courts tell us to look at purpose and effect. Is the purpose to deny fair representation? Is that the effect?

Well, they say even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while. No one has been more critical of the new Citizens Redistricting Commission than I have been. But now their first plans are out in “visual” form, with draft maps to be released on June 10. At first glance, the squirrel got its nut.

These appear to be good plans for several reasons. First, it is clear the Commission and staff listened to the community input they received. What different areas said they wanted are reflected in many of the new maps.

Second, they said they would not use political data and they did not. The maps are balanced in partisan terms; both parties have reason to be pleased and displeased. There is no partisan advantage in these first maps. And the maps draw a remarkable number of politically marginal districts. Naysayers criticized me when I said the objective should be to create competitive districts; well, whether by design or by chance that is what the Commission has done. Now the important thing is to retain that political balance in the final maps, especially when the Commission comes under assault from bruised incumbents who don’t like their districts.

Steve Maviglio knows neither the history nor the law on redistricting. California law as to population deviations was settled 38 years ago by the State Supreme Court in the case known as Legislature v Reinecke. There the court laid down the standard in clear English: “Population of Senate and Assembly districts should be within one percent of the ideal excerpt in unusual circumstances, and in no event should a deviation greater than two percent be permitted.” Maviglio cites several federal cases that have no bearing on our state districts, while he ignores the clear mandate of state law. To follow Maviglio’s rule, Senate districts could deviate by 46,000 people. In no way could this be constitutional.

And he should know that. He worked for the legislature when they last did the districts 10 years ago. The deviation of State Senate districts is exactly TWO PEOPLE. For Assembly districts it is LESS THAN 20 PEOPLE. Maviglio contends that passage of Propositions 11 and 20 (that set up the Commission) changed all this. I worked on those initiatives and there is nothing at all in the measures nor their history that suggests anyone intended to change the district population standards. It is amusing that someone who opposed both measures suddenly finds meanings in them no one intended.

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.

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.