It is being reporter over at the Sacramento Bee (and I am sure other places) that legislative leaders have scuttled any attempts at putting redistricting reform or term-limits loosening on the November ballot. Dan Weintraub of the Bee speaks pretty plainly over on his blog.
Make no bones about it, the redistricting process in California is hopeless broken. The reality is that the majority uses the currently system to artficially inflake and ‘lock in’ legislative districts that had predictable results in the last election with 153 partisan officeholders for State Senate, Assembly and United States Congress all getting re-elected (or in those cases where an incumbent was term-limited out or retiring, their seat was ‘passed’ to the nominee of their same political party 100% of the time).
The red herring in this whole process was this idea of tying redistricting reform to a modification of the term-limits placed on legislators with the passage of Proposition 140 back in 1990. This would have been insane given the popularity of term limits with the voters.
Five times now there have been efforts to change the redistricting process — all five having failed, it seems like a fools errand to take a proven hard-to-sell product (redistricting reform) and anchor it down with a term limits weakening that would be doomed out the gate.
I guess I am not as worked up as some that there will be no legislatively placed measure on the ballot for real redistricting reform — after all, the current process works so much to the political benefit of the Democrats in power that to change it would be to lesson their political strangehold on the legislature. So I never expected it to go anywhere.
I do applaud Governor Schwarzenegger for his efforts though — both for his strong support for Proposition 77 last year (after Bill Mundell did the heavy lifting to get it onto the ballot) and for his support in these latest negotiations in Sacramento.
P.S. Here’s the take from KQED’s John Myers.