Redistricting: a Family Feud

Factions of the California Republican Party are at each others’ throats, but this battle has nothing to do with party ideology, the usual cause. This fight is over political power and survival.

What pits GOP members of the state Legislature against California Republicans in the House of Representatives is the prospect of redrawing legislative and congressional districts after the 2000 census.

The state Constitution gives the Legislature this power. Republicans fear that with Democrats controlling both houses of the Legislature and the governor’s office, the Democrats will draft a new set of maps that benefits their party and threatens the tenuous GOP control of the House in Washington. So California Republicans in D.C. are promoting an initiative petition campaign to take the power to redistrict away from the lawmakers and give it to a nonpartisan commission appointed by the state Supreme Court. Similar proposals have been made in the past and defeated by California voters.

To make the idea more attractive to voters this time around, the initiative includes a provision to cut state legislators’ salaries from $99,000 to $75,000 and to reduce their daily expense allowance from $121 to $75. The Sacramento legislators are furious at their Washington colleagues, whose $137,000 annual salary, of course, would not be affected. The proposed state constitutional amendment is almost certain to make the March ballot.

California is expected to gain at least two House seats as a result of the 2000 census, boosting the delegation to 54, the nation’s largest. With Democrats drawing new district lines, the party might be able to pick up a dozen seats. There now are 27 Democrats and 24 Republicans in the California delegation, with one vacancy.

There is, of course, no guarantee that a court-appointed commission would give the GOP a better deal than the Democrats. Back in the 1970s, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan vetoed a Democratic-drafted redistricting that GOP lawmakers liked. Reagan’s veto threw the issue to a commission that drew a plan even more favorable to Democrats. As columnist George Will says, redistricting is a political process no matter how nonpartisan you try to make it.