What's wrong with Arnie's redistricting plan

[cally]

On the surface, I'm for better congressional districts in California. I think Dems could pick up seats. I knew that any plan Arnie pushed had to bad for Dems though. I've asked various folks, but noone could explain why. Here's a great explanation. If this passes, Dems are screwed. We need to defeat this. Polls are showing it's losing but we have to get folks out to vote. It's important for all of us.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/8/29/124850/043

Why Arnold's Redistricting Plan is a Disaster for Democrats Nationwide
by Jefe Le Gran

Cross posted on Daily Kos (by calpolitic)
Did you really think Arnold Schwarzenegger was pushing a mid-decade redistricting in California out of the goodness of his heart?

Make no mistake about it, redistricting is nothing more than a power struggle. It's about who has power, who wants power, and who is going to do whatever it takes to get power.

Arnold's redistricting plan is aimed squarely at keeping the GOP in control of Congress for decades to come.

Read the fine print.

Much has been made about the fact that Schwarzenegger's plan takes redistricting out of the hands of the State Legislature and puts it into the hands of three retired judges. But the real power in Schwarzenegger's plan is not the panel of judges; it is the fact that the judges can only draw maps after following a set of strict and powerful criteria - criteria that hurts Democrats and helps Republicans.

[Oerdin]

1. When I was a kid.

I grew up in Mira Mesa on Hydra lane which is a minor sububan east-west running road no where near any of the main roads. If you lived on the south side of the street you were in one district and if you were on the north side of the street you were in another district. Bare in mind that this is a tine residential street in the middle of a suburb.

That's just a horrible way to do things. Neighbors should be able to talk to each other about the election without having cities divided up like that. Keeping cities and towns in the same district is indeed the best way to do it. Further more the population growth in the inland areas comes about entirely because people in the liberal coastal areas move towards cheaper housing inland. Mr. Le Gran's entire argument is predicated upon the belief that these people will stop being Democrats because they move inland and that just isn't true any more then Republicans who move to the Bay Area suddenly start voting for gay rights.

Mr. Le Gran is correct that in the short term the Democratic Party probably will lose about four seats if we ungerrymander the voting districts but that just goes to show how badly we have cheated in the past. We will bounce back because we will find new leadership who can actually reach voters. Currently we have tired old wind bags who can't identify with anyone and that's why they'd lose in a stand up fight. We can do better then that.

As we've discused in the other redistricting threads creating objective criteria which define how districts shall be drawn and which remove incumbant's ability to rig the system in their favor is the best way to go for the state and the voters. Last election not a single incumbant was unseated nor a single seat changed hands because the entire system has been rigged by incumbants to protect incumbants. That is a sick democracy and it should be clear to everyone that something needs to change. Creating fair and objective rules which dictate how districts should be designated is the only way to do this.

Naturally, the incumbants don't want to lose the unfair advantage they've created via gerrymandering so we can expect them and their cronies to cry us a river about how removing their ability to gerrymander is from satan. I don't buy their crocodile tears though. ;)

[cascadiance]

2. Oerdin, as noted before, I sympathize with your objectives...

But I think it is the wrong time to do this sort of reform. Though the districting now is likely a bit more gerrymandered to favor the Democrats, nationwide gerrymandering is tending to favor Republicans more. Also, campaign financing in most places except Arizona and Maine (where we have clean elections campaigns) favors Republicans that don't mind servicing their constituents based on the criteria of how much they are able to pay them, not broken down by how many people in a given area want something done a certain way.

If you don't tackle campaign financing rules first (and punt folks like the DLC out of heavy control of the Dems in the process who are also corrupted by these current campaign finance rules), you will sway the control that much more over to the Republicans, and you'll never get campaign financing reformed, and we will always be owned by the Republicans and corporations. If we can FIRST get in clean elections campaign rules to put that area more under clean footing, THEN I'd be for loosening up Democrat's control over the redistricting here in California. If you don't do it in that order, you won't get the campaign financing solved, and we still will have problems (for different reasons) of who represents us, because congress critters will continue to represent corporations before they represent their constituents, no matter how much better laid out the contituents will be. It won't matter about the latter, and might in fact favor Republicans in many districts where there won't be much "minority voice" at all for folks in more "homogeneous" precincts.

Solving campaign financing first will address your concern about later being able to "win over voters" with better arguments towards them, because then reps will be representing the grass roots, not corporations and well-heeled special interests.

This is the wrong time to pass this proposition as it is written. I will be with you later when we've fixed other things first. But this isn't a priority for Dems to fix now. I think we as Dems need to understand that. If we swallow this and vote for it now, we'll be forever screwed. The downside of it now is that we won't get a lot of new blood in quickly, but if you studied the "Clean Elections" web site, getting that legislation in place also got a lot of "new blood" in, by attracting a different breed of candidates that want to feel more in tune with voters' needs and feel with the new rules they have a better chance at winning over corporate sponsored candidates.

As I noted earlier too, I'm all for rules being used instead of people making decisions. But how those rules are constructed is just as important as using them. That needs to be a very well thought out process and something that the two parties can compromise and agree upon. They might get a bit too complicated if we're not careful, but I think they shouldn't be overly simplistic either.

[Oerdin]

3. If it matters.

The folks who don't want to remove the assembly's control over districts should be happy. The public seems very against just about all the props this time around. I'm thinking 80 & 77 are the only one's I'll vote for though I'm still going to read the paper about the others to make sure I have 100% of the information.

Clean elections are always a good thing and likely we'd get huge dividends off such a proposition here in California.

[Oerdin]

4. Couldn't we use the proposition system?

I very much agree that we need to get the corporations and the unions out of the buying legislation game. Infact I'd love it if they capped contributions to $100 per candidate per year for everyone (people, corporations, unions) and the rest of the money came directly from public financing. I understand where you're coming from about campaign finance being much more difficult to accomplish if Republicans are in charge though the analysists say we'll only lose about 4 seats which would still give us control at the state level.

In any event couldn't we play the same game the Republicans are playing and put campaign finance reform on a proposition? It seems like that would bipass any road blocks in the legislature and such a move would likely be very popular with the people.

[SoonerShankle]

5. just remember that...

corporations spend $24 to every $1 spent by unions. As long as the caps you propose are equal for everyone, then I'm all for what you say, but as it is, Prop 75 is trying to keep unions from spending money on political issues that affect them while doing nothing about the vast amounts of money spent by corporations (think the $100,000 dinners in support of the Gov).

What you propose allows those with a stake to make their statements, while taking big money out of the equation. If only politics made such sense in reality...

[Oerdin]

6. Of course.

The caps have to be equal for everyone or it isn't fair. Prop 75 is a blatant partisan attempt to silence unions and unions only and that is why I've spoken out against it. So far the only props I've supported are 80 and 77.