Why Redistricting Matters

As Flap noted yesterday, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has filed suit to remove the redistricing measure from the ballot due to issues discussed here. Flap doesn’t find the threat of removal to be worrisome, writing:
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If the Attorney General is successful in this suit, and the Proposition is disqualified from the ballot, it may help the Governor’s reform agenda. Redrawing district boundaries for politcal hacks are of little interest to anyone other than the politicians themselves. And of course, there would be a constitutional challenge to delay implementation until after the next census, in any case. The Special Election ballot is not harmed with the removal of this measure.
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He is challenged by Interocitor in both the comments section and in a separate post strongly supportive of redistricting reform. I think Interocitor is correct, both on the constitutionality issue and especially on the importance of redistricting.

Here's why.

I’m not a lawyer and I try not to play one on the Internet, but I’m not sure why Flap is so certain constitutional challenges would delay implementation until after the next census. As Interocitor points out in the comments to Flap’s post, this didn’t happen in the Texas redistricting case, which was a blatant power grab but went through quickly and which as so far been upheld. It seems like the SCOTUS has spoken on this matter last year with Vieth v. Jubelirer allowing redistricting even when for blatant political advantage (and to a lesser extent with Shaw v. Reno). If the've allowed these in the past and the CA constitution is amended to make a system less susceptible to rigging for racial or party reasons – where’s the challenge that will hold it up? You 98% of bloggers who are lawyers, am I missing something?

More importantly, I think Flap misses the mark in questioning redistricting reform’s importance in the Governor’s reform agenda. If anything, I think you could make an argument that redistricting reform is the most important part of the governor’s agenda.
Flap writes “Redrawing district boundaries for politcal hacks are of little interest to anyone other than the politicians themselves.” Small distinction first, this issue isn’t “redrawing district boundaries.” It’s about the process by which that occurs. Minor point but probably important as I think voters take a more active interest in processes or initiatives than they do about any given political occurrence (such as a round of redistricting) if for no other reason than press coverage and campaign ads.

More to the point, redistricting itself – that is, “redrawing district boundaties for political hacks” is probably of little interest to most people. That is a major problemwith redistricting, it’s a wonkish process most don’t follow that gradually allows politicians to pick their constituents and become less responsive to their wishes. To me that’s an argument why it is important to take it out of the hands of politicians, not that the matter isn’t important.

Most importantly, I strongly disagree with Flap’s view that redistricting is not an important part to the reform package and that the “Special Election ballot is not harmed with the removal of this measure.” If we’re truly talking about “reform” intended to break the deadlock of Sacramento, what other initiative would do more? Reigning in the public employee unions a little would be nice, but does anyone really think their political spending is the largest source of problems in out state? School funding requirements? Parental consent? Teacher tenure? Drug discounts? Can you make an argument that in the long run changing any of these would have as positive an impact on CA politics as bringing about a system where a larger number of legislators are forced to be more responsive to voters’ desires - a system that doesn’t result in legislators operating at the extreme edges of their party because the primary is their only concern for re-election?

Would Prop 77 fix all this? Probably not. But it would be significantly better than the current system (hard to be worse). For this reason, I’ll be rooting for it to stay on the ballot.

Cross-posted at the Bear Flag League Special Election Page