Free Republic

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- The citizens commission established by voters to create an independent process for drawing California's legislative and congressional districts has delivered on its first set of maps, voting to adopt new boundaries that appear to increase the reach of majority Democrats. The 14-member California Citizens Redistricting Commission voted Friday on final draft versions of district maps for Congress, the state Legislature and the state Board of Equalization, which administers sales and use taxes.

Republicans’ increasing complaints that the commission appointed to oversee the redrawing of borders for state legislative and congressional seats has gone partisan are “absolutely not true,” according to Gil Ontai, a San Diego architect who is on the panel. In an interview with a U-T editorial writer, he cited a lack of appreciation of the “complexity of this process.” We have no reason to question Ontai’s honesty or sincerity. Nevertheless, some of the criticism aimed at the commission seems valid. Plans to release a second draft of proposed borders this week were scrapped. Instead, interested parties can go online to...

Do you live in a "gayborhood"? Are you part of an Armenian sub-community or do you reside among black farmers and agriculturists? These and myriad other questions that most of us have never thought to ask will be answered Aug. 15, the day the Citizen's Redistricting Commission is scheduled to release its final maps. .. Among the criteria that the commission must consider when drawing its boundaries is "community of interest," a concept so vague as to remind one of Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography - "I know it when I see it." Knowing a community when one...

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...

The ideal of a citizens’ commission is good. We should not have politicians picking their voters. Voters should pick their politicians and perhaps the districts lines in which they run. But ideals often prove impractical. In the case of the Citizens Redistricting Commission, impractical would be an upgrade. When I testified in front of the Commission in March of this year, I warned them of the voters’ cynicism – the sense of many that their vote doesn't count because district lines are rigged and the system, i.e. gerrymandering, is unfair. I asked them not to hire a line-drawing firm that...

If those who volunteered for the state's new redistricting commission believed that it would be a convivial civic exercise, last week's initial clashes over hiring legal and demographic advisers proved otherwise. The decisions that the 14-member commission makes on 120 legislative, 53 congressional and four Board of Equalization districts will affect not only political careers, but the state's ideological ambience for the next decade. An odd-bedfellows alliance of political reformers and right-of-center business and political groups, including former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, pushed two ballot measures that empowered the commission as the alternative to the Legislature drawing districts. . . ....

Eight names will be drawn at random Thursday from a pool of 36 finalists for positions on the state's new redistricting commission, and a Santa Monica College political science professor has calculated that there are 3.2 million possible combinations. What's more, Dr. Brain Lawson has figured the chances of names being drawn by gender, county of residence, income, ethnicity and what he calls being "incumbent friendly," basing his calculations on the detailed profiles of each finalist available on the Internet. He sees 11 of the 36 being "incumbent friendly" due to experience with redistricting and government, and names them in...

California legislators of both parties, then-Gov. Gray Davis and the George W. Bush White House made a pact with the political devil nine years ago by fixing outcomes of legislative and congressional elections for a decade. They agreed to redraw the boundaries of 120 legislative and 53 congressional districts to declare party ownership of each, lock in the partisan status quo and lock out real choice for voters. Since then, through five election cycles, there have been 765 legislative and congressional elections in California and in only about 15 of them have voters managed to overcome the intent of the...

Prop 19: When Worlds Collide.  NO.   If this simply allowed people to cultivate and smoke marijuana themselves and left the rest of us alone, it would be worth considering.   But it goes much further and provides that “no person shall be … discriminated against or denied any right or privilege” for pot use, inviting a lawsuit every time an employer tries to require a drug test, for example.  If you want to smoke pot in your own world, I don’t care.  But don’t bring it into mine.     Prop 20: Congressional Redistricting. YES.  This finishes the work we began in...

Proposition 19: NO – Marijuana legalization My biggest concern with this initiative, aside from the basic policy considerations, are two large unintended consequences: 1) will drug abuse grow, thus putting more of a strain on our out-of-control welfare system; 2) the impact of lawsuits on employers seeking to enforce a zero-tolerance policy (especially important in the defense industry). Proposition 20: YES – Redistricting reform extended to Congress Prop. 20 will make the independent State Commission on Redistricting re-draw Congressional Districts in 2011, instead of the legislature working with liberal interests, just as the independent commission will re-draw Legislative district boundaries...

The California NAACP president whose ballot argument supporting Proposition 20 appears in voter information guides is being paid tens of thousands of dollars by the campaign to serve as a consultant, records show. Alice Huffman has a long history of serving as a paid consultant for ballot measures endorsed by her NAACP group – she has received hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2005 – but Proposition 20 marks the first time that she can recall signing a ballot argument for such campaigns. Huffman said she was not paid to sign the ballot argument sent recently to more than 11...

<p>Like doughnuts or deodorant, politics is about selling. And what sells a product isn't so much what the product does, but what the buyer thinks it does. Take Proposition 56. It doesn't really matter if it actually reforms the budget, because as long as people think they are getting budget reform, they will vote for it.</p>