Author: Tony Quinn

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.

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 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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

With GOP attorney general candidate Steve Cooley’s loss to
Democrat Kamala Harris now confirmed, the Republicans have now lost every
statewide office for only the second time since 1882.   What’s worse, this happened in the midst of
national GOP landslide, and Cooley’s loss was unexpected; in fact, every
pre-election public and private poll showed Cooley winning.  So why did he lose?

Three reasons.

The first was of his own doing.  Asked by a Los Angeles Times reporter if he
planned to "double dip" by taking his district attorney pension along with his
$150,000 a year salary as attorney general, Cooley answered, "Yes, I do. I
earned it. I definitely earned whatever pension rights I have and I will certainly
rely upon that to supplement the very low, incredibly low, salary that’s paid
to the state attorney general."

Harris blanketed the airwaves with a TV spot
repeating this statement and asking the obvious question, "$150,000 a year
isn’t enough"?  In a state with families
struggling to make ends meet in this recession, here is poor Mr. Cooley unable
to live on $150k a year.  How much
sympathy do you suppose the ordinary voter had for that?  Democratic operatives say that Cooley’s
numbers began falling in their polls as soon as the TV spot ran.