MAP TIME IN CAPITOL DRAWS NEAR - DEMOCRATS HAVE A HUGE ADVANTAGE IN REDISTRICTING, AFTER THE 2000 CENSUS, BUT GREED OR OVERREACHING COULD BACKFIRE
Daniel Borenstein
Contra Costa Times
March 4, 2001
The U.S. Census Bureau release this month of detailed California population numbers will launch one of the decade's most important political battles, a fight for partisan advantage and a struggle for racial and ethnic inclusion.
The Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis will use the census data to redraw the congressional, Assembly and state Senate district lines across the state.
"It is probably the rawest display of power politics that we have," said A.G. Block, chief editor of California Journal.
The new political boundaries will help determine for the next decade which party dominates the Legislature and California's congressional delegation. The latter, in turn, could alter control of the U.S. House of Representatives, where a shift of just six seats could tip the balance of power.
In the East Bay, redistricting will help determine whether Republicans have a chance to unseat Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez; whether Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, must fight every election for her political survival; and which party will win the seat Assemblywoman Lynne Leach, R-Walnut Creek, must vacate next year because of term limits.
With the governor and a majority of the Legislature from the same party, Democrats are firmly in control of the political map making.
Republicans hold little leverage. Their best hope is that Democrats will try to woo them to avoid a possible ballot referendum, or that they can find relief later in the courts.
Most Republicans are resigned, Block said, "that there is 10 years of wilderness ahead for them."
New boundaries will greatly influence the political strength of California's Latinos, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. By unifying minority groups in one district, or splitting them across several, the map makers can affect election outcomes.
"This is the nuts and bolts of how you create a multiracial democracy," said civil rights attorney Constance Rice. "You've got to make sure you have the tools that ease different groups into positions of power. Otherwise you have groups feeling excluded and oppressed."
The backdrop for this political and ethnic struggle is unlike any the state has seen:
A confusing maze of new U.S. Supreme Court decisions has left legal experts scratching their heads trying to figure out how far the Legislature must go to protect racial minority interests.
Latinos, whose numbers in the Legislature soared in the 1990s, are in an unprecedented position to influence the process.
Term limits have made many legislators more interested in districts they might run in than ones they now represent.
"Term limits is the wild card because it makes the mix of ambitions and personal interest more volatile than it's ever been before," said Bernard Grofman, a UC Irvine political scientist.
"You've got incumbents who are now being term-limited out of the state Legislature who are interested in finding someplace to go. That puts them squarely up against the congressional representatives."
***
Redistricting starts with the decennial national census. The results show which states have gained population and which have lost. They are used to reapportion the 435 U.S. House seats among the states.
A complex formula, chosen by Congress, and used in every census since 1940, allocates the seats. The results of the 2000 census, announced in December, gave California one more House seat, for a total of 53.
Step Two starts this month when the Census Bureau releases more detailed numbers, including race and ethnicity, showing where within each state people live. The Legislature and governor will use the data to redistrict, to redraw the legislative and congressional boundaries within the state so each district has roughly equal populations.
Where those lines are drawn is what this fight is all about.
The party in power usually tries to "pack and crack" the opposition. Democrats might place as many Republicans as possible in one district so there are fewer left over to pose a threat in adjoining regions. Or Democrats might try to split up the Republicans so their numbers in each district are too small to win.
There are legal limits to political gerrymandering, the art of drawing lines for partisan advantage. California voters in 1980 changed the state Constitution to require that map makers avoid splitting cities and counties if possible. Beyond that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that simply drawing lines that make it more difficult for the opposition to win is permissible.
***
The standard becomes a lot more complicated when the discussion moves from partisanship to race and ethnicity.
Since the last redistricting, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of fuzzy opinions on racial gerrymandering.
"Everybody is concerned about what the new lay of the land is," said Kathay Feng of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles. "It is so unclear what can be litigated and what can't."
The legal battle over racial gerrymandering originates with the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, which sought to ensure that every citizen, regardless of race, has an equal opportunity to vote, and have his or her vote count. That has come to mean that minority votes cannot be diluted through packing or cracking.
But the thresholds are unclear. How many voters from a racial group in a district are too many (packing)? How many are too small (cracking)? How important a factor should race be in redistricting?
During the 1990s, the high court reduced the significance of race. Now, "you cannot have a plan in which race is the predominant or sole motive for why a district was drawn the way it was drawn," said Grofman. "It's a major, major difference from 10 years ago. But it's not really clear how much it matters."
The high court has given some other hints to legislators drawing redistricting plans: Maximizing the number of minority districts is not required. Using districts with "bizarre" shapes to strengthen minority political power is bad. Districts should be "reasonably" compact and "maintain communities of interest."
"There is no bright-line rule," Feng said. "The Supreme Court has engaged in a we'll-know-it-when-we-see-it stance on redistricting."
The political battle will play out under those vague legal rules.
****
The redrawing of political maps must be completed in September, when candidates begin filing for the March 2002 primary.
To guard against a referendum, Democrats might try to placate enough Republicans to win a two-thirds approval in the Legislature. The state GOP has already warned its legislators it will punish them if they break ranks.
While the Republican redistricting leverage is tenuous, Latino legislators are in a strong position. Their numbers in the Legislature have grown from seven in 1990 to 27 today.
"The Latino Caucus is a fairly significant player for the first time," said Jaime Regalado, director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.
Because its members are predominantly Democrats, the Latino Caucus holds veto power over any redistricting plan. No plan is likely to garner majority support without them.
Latinos also have geographic and numeric advantages that other minorities don't enjoy, Grofman says. Asian-Americans are spread out across the state, making it difficult to draw districts that give them a vote majority. an influx of Latinos has diluted regional concentrations of African-Americans.
Minority groups must unify, says Rice, former co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Los Angeles office. "If we don't band together, if each group comes in with different maps, we're not going to have any kind of impact."
****
In the past, the majority party in each house of the Legislature has respected members in the other house and both have deferred to their party leaders in Congress.
"Incumbent self-interest has always been the first rule of redistricting," Regalado notes.
That would have meant this year that Democratic leaders from each house state Senate, Assembly and Congress would have drawn the lines for their respective houses and then the Democratic-controlled Legislature would have passed them without question.
The goal would have been to protect incumbents and, if possible, increase the number of seats dominated by party voters.
But 2001 is different. Twenty-one members of the Assembly and seven members of the state Senate are barred from seeking re-election next year. Many have their eyes on higher office.
State voters approved Proposition 140, the term-limit initiative, in November 1990, just before the last redistricting. But it wasn't taken seriously then, says Tim Hodson, former staff director for the Senate Elections and Reapportionment Committee.
Assembly members still had six years left in office and state senators had up to eight.
"In 1991, we were aware of term limits but it just wasn't that big a factor because the definition of eternity for many politicians is the election after next," said Hodson. "When term limits would kick in was an eternity away."
***
Deference between the houses might be a thing of the past. But partisanship is not.
Democrats recognize they have the upper hand. They hold 50 of 80 Assembly seats, 25 of 40 state Senate seats and 30 of 52 seats in California's House delegation. The question now is how their leaders will take advantage.
National Democratic leaders need to gain congressional seats in California to offset expected losses elsewhere. While Democrats are strong in California, they are weak in other states across the nation.
"Every seat nationally counts because Congress is so close," Grofman said.
However, redistricting to gain seats can be a gamble. The more districts Democrats try to grab, the thinner the margins will be in many and the greater the chance that some districts might swing back to Republicans.
"It's not that they're necessarily marginal seats today," Grofman said. "But if you try to stretch, you can do just enough to turn the seats from safe seats to competitive seats that you might lose."
Thus, Democrats might be better off trying to increase their registration advantage in districts they already hold rather than using redistricting to try to grab more seats, Grofman says.
"In California, Democrats are really in great shape. What they have to avoid doing is getting greedy. If you try to spread your strength too thin, you can risk losing and really put yourself in the position of becoming the minority party if you get a bad year."
THE HISTORY
For decades, California redistricting has been ugly and long.
1971: Democrats controlled the Legislature; Republican Ronald Reagan was the governor. Reagan vetoed the Legislature's first plan, sending the issue to the state Supreme Court.
The justices ordered the 1972 elections conducted under the boundaries of the previous decade for the Assembly and state Senate races, but temporarily adopted the vetoed boundaries for congressional elections that year.
After Reagan vetoed a second legislative plan in 1973, the Supreme Court imposed its own lines, using boundaries devised by three retired judges.
1981: The Democratic Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown drew the lines. Republicans challenged the plan in court and put a referendum on the ballot to overturn it. The state Supreme Court ordered the lines used for the 1982 elections.
Voters rejected the plan, prompting the Legislature to craft new maps. This time, Democrats rounded up enough Republican backing to gain two-thirds approval in the Legislature, a move that blocked another possible referendum.
Those lines stood for the rest of the decade. A legal challenge to the congressional boundaries languished in the courts until 1989, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider overturning them.
1991: As in 1971, Democrats controlled the Legislature and the governor was a Republican, Pete Wilson. Once again the governor vetoed the Democratic proposals, sending the issue to the state Supreme Court. The court again imposed boundaries recommended by three retired judges.