Now that the maps have come out from the Citizens Redistricting Commission, there are hosts of people that are being critical of the final product because of the impact they have on one or two individual elected officials that they care about.  Most of these concerns are misplaced.

First of all, Prop 11 and Prop 20 did not cause Congressmen Miller, Royce, and potentially Dreier to run against each other in 2012.  California demographic and political changes did that.  These two ballot measures also did not cause Gallegly and McKeon to be lumped together.  While the number of Republicans in the California Congressional delegation will shrink, the losses are nowhere near where they would have been if the staff of Speaker Perez would have been able to draw the maps over at 1020 N Street.  Then we would be talking about losing nine seats instead of three.

Prop 11 and Prop 20 probably saved the political careers of people like Buck McKeon, Mary Bono Mack, Jeff Denham, Brian Bilbray and Dan Lungren.  At least under these maps, people like Lungren have a fighting chance.  He would rather run against Ami Bera in the seat he is scheduled to defend than be lumped into a race against Doris Matsui or Tom McClintock.  Neither would work out well for him.  For those of you who want to blame Prop 11 or 20 for the current Republican angst – you are not seeing the whole battlefield.

There also seems to be some belief that the referendum process would somehow produce a different result for any member of Congress that would to help fund the effort.  Really?

Why would Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes, John Campbell, Darrell Issa, Ken Calvert, Mary Bono Mack, or Buck McKeon fund such an effort? They are personally good with the current proposals, and personal political futures are what drive redistricting decisions.

So some of you might say that Miller, Gallegly, Royce or Drier might want to fund such an effort.  In addition to the possibility that the referendum fails, there is still a huge possibility that the courts come back with seats that cause exactly the same situation – only six months later these Members of Congress have fewer resources available to fight for re-election because they wasted time on a referendum.

People are also making the assertion that sending this matter to the courts is a lock for an improved product.  Not true. Not true at all. There is still a great deal of uncertainty on what the courts will do. A different set of eyes on these maps may be able to save seats on the Central Coast for people like Strickland or Blakeslee, but at the same time could cause problems with Huff and prospective Republican State Senators from the center of Orange County.

Anyone who thinks court-drawn districts will equate to maps just like 1990 must not have noticed that California demographics have changed dramatically since 1990.  The same seats are not possible because of the growth of some areas of the state and the decline of Republican registration.

Should the Blakeslee and Strickland senate districts be better?  Yes.  Santa Clarita should be in Strickland’s district and Blakesslee’s district should stop at the Monterey County line.  That would make sense and still allow the commission to meet all of the requirements under federal and state law. In fact, it would make the districts more compact.

Are court maps going to be worse than the commission? Probably not, and it may be determined that the Senate plan may be worth that risk.  However, donors would be asked to spend millions with the chance of no real improvement.  Risk is involved.

Finally, for those of you that are celebrating that the commission has been better at transparency than the Legislature would have been, I say big deal.  That would be like arguing that my baseball team is better than yours because the ownership group is better than the McCourts.  That is a really, really low standard.

The Commission has been better at transparency than the Legislature, but certainly nowhere near where they should have been.  Canceling releases of draft maps, delays in producing Public Records Act request responses, claiming that data used to draw Voting Rights Act districts as somehow privileged, having commissioners defend the territory around their homes at the expense of neighboring communities, and having “visualizatons” drawn outside of public view and then having them evolve into final draft maps is not something that I would be embracing as optimal transparency.  It is better than it would have been, but not as good as it should have been.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 11:06 am and is filed under Blog Posts.