Remember when our grade school crossing guards used to say, "The lines are your friends"? Well, that could also apply to members of the Legislature and the California congressional delegation.
After every decennial census, the Legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of all legislative and congressional districts to take population growth and shifts into account. In 2001, legislators on both side of the aisle conspired to rejigger district lines to remove even the semblance of competitiveness, making the overwhelming majority of seats slam-dunks for either Democrats or Republicans. To understand the process, think of two retail giants illegally colluding to divvy up sales territory, thereby awarding themselves geographical monopolies.
Democrats wanted to lock in their huge legislative majorities in both the Assembly and Senate for the next decade. Republicans, under orders from the White House, wanted to protect their congressional majority against any effort to carve out more Democratic seats in California. It was a blatant case of the politicians picking their voters, rather than the voters picking the politicians.
Given this outrageous self-dealing, I urged then-Gov. Gray Davis, to whom I was senior political advisor, to denounce the redistricting plan, veto it and send the job to a panel of retired judges, as required when the Legislature and governor can't agree on a plan. But for two very practical reasons, that option turned out not to be feasible.
First, the Legislature sent the bill to the governor so late in the year that if he had vetoed it, there wouldn't have been time to redraw the boundaries before filing deadlines for the March 2002 primary had passed. Second, Democratic and Republican leaders -- although they could scarcely agree on when to take bathroom breaks -- mustered more than a two-thirds vote in both houses for the redistricting plan, meaning a veto would have been easily overridden.
What are the practical results of this bipartisan gerrymander? Our general elections are now "competitive" in roughly the same sense that the old Soviet Politburo "elections" were competitive. In November's election, not a single seat changed party hands among all 80 Assembly seats, 20 state Senate seats and 53 congressional seats on the ballot. This despite more money being spent on both sides than ever before; in fact, national records were set for spending in a state Senate race and a state lower-house race. Most incumbents won with more than 60% of the vote. In several cases, no one even bothered to challenge the incumbent.
