Politicians settled for a 'draw' in redistricting

Peter Schrag
The Sacramento Bee
February 17, 2002

When Gray Davis was elected governor in November 1998, California became the Democrats' best hope for recapturing control of the House of Representatives after the 2001 reapportionment.

With their party dominating both branches of the Legislature and the state expected to gain at least one House seat after the 2000 census, Democrats believed that, with a little muscle and imagination in the post-census redistricting, they had a better than even chance to enlarge the 28-24 margin they then had in the California delegation. Before the 2000 election, said Republican consultant Tony Quinn, a veteran of redistricting battles past, the conservative Rose Institute estimated that Democrats could gain as many as eight House seats by 2002.

Some Republican deep pockets obviously saw things the same way. In 1999 they sponsored Proposition 24, designed to take redistricting out of the hands of the governor and the (Democratic) politicians in the Legislature and give it to a panel of judges. But before Proposition 24 could go to the voters, the state Supreme Court ordered it off the ballot, ruling that it violated the state constitution's prohibition against initiatives that deal with more than one subject (as a lure to voters, proponents had tacked on provisions cutting legislative salaries.).

In November 2000, the Democrats seemed well on the way to their majority, picking up four House seats in California. That gave them a 32-20 advantage in the state delegation and helped close the gap in Washington to the slim 11-vote margin (222-211) in the House that the Republicans now cling to. Last summer, leaders of the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, talked hopefully about gaining yet another three or four seats after reapportionment.

What made it seem even more plausible was that the president pro-tem of the State Senate was - and is - John Burton, brother of the late Rep. Phil Burton. In 1981-82, the ferociously combative San Francisco congressman had drawn what was probably the most partisan gerrymander in California history. He called it his "contribution to modern art."

But history did not repeat itself. What Democrats hoped and Republicans feared -- a gerrymander that could swing control of the House -- never came to pass. Instead, in the redistricting of 2001 the two major parties played for the status quo. The Democrats will net one extra California House seat this November, giving them a probable 33-20 edge, but nothing close to the four that some DCCC leaders had hoped for.

Compared to some of the partisan donnybrooks of the past, last year's reapportionment of all California districts, legislative as well as congressional, was an exercise in sweetness and harmony that included, most improbably, a reliably reported deal-clinching meeting between Michael Berman, the Los Angeles political consultant who is the Democrats' reapportionment honcho, and Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political advisor. Both parties now proclaim victory.

The national Republicans, says Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg, who was speaker when the reapportionment deal was cooked, were "scared of California." To them, as another California Democrat put it, California is a mystery, full of people they don't understand, and where they keep losing. They were thus willing to settle for the status quo. "We never imagined," Hertzberg said, "that we'd get to keep the 50 seats (of 80) that we now have in the Assembly."

The Democrats could have sought more seats, both in the Legislature and Congress, by drawing the lines so that some Democratic voters in relatively safe districts were moved to toss-up districts. But Hertzberg says they were also fearful that if they had steamrolled a blatantly partisan reapportionment through the Legislature, the GOP would have launched a referendum that could have clouded the whole deal. By winning a two-thirds majority in each house of the Legislature - which required Republican votes - the plan went into effect immediately, precluding the chances for a referendum.

Sen. Jim Brulte, the leader of the Republican caucus in the Senate, says that the talk about a referendum was "a bluff from the beginning. There never was money for a referendum." Because the GOP had no resources to win any protracted battles, "the White House felt that anything that brought us 19 seats (in the House) could be considered a victory." Given the number of seats that the Republicans believed they could pick up through their control of the reapportionment process in other states, playing for a tie in California was perfectly acceptable. Karl Rove was "intimately involved" in those calculations.

But neither did the Democrats have the stomach for the endless battles -- lawsuits, initiatives -- that followed Phil Burton's gerrymanders in the 1980s. "This plan," Hertzberg said, "is litigation proof."

In fact the deal is not litigation proof. MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is suing to get two or three more Latino districts in the San Fernando Valley and San Diego. The challenge faces tough hurdles -- MALDEF's attempt to stop the March primary until districts are redrawn has already failed. But it does reflect potential strains within the party between the growing power of Latinos and the residual domination of white (mostly Jewish) liberals on the west side of Los Angeles. Last year's nasty Los Angeles mayoralty fight between James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa didn't help.

There were other reasons for the deal. Although Senate President pro-tem John Burton talks pugnacious, he seems not nearly as combative as his older brother. It's possible, Brulte said, "that the Democrats could have picked up five seats. This is the only state in the union where they could have picked up (any significant number of) seats." But Burton was afraid of overreaching.

One Republican consultant privately speculated that Burton might even have been a little embarrassed by his older brother's chutzpah in the gerrymander of the 1980s: "John, who's always had good relations with Republicans, decided to act in a civil manner."

When I asked Burton whether Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, chair of the DCCC, hadn't expected more, Burton brusquely replied: "That's how much they know about California."

A spokesman for the DCCC, echoing House Democratic whip Nancy Pelosi, and giving his own spin, now plays down the expectations. California, he said, "is an incredibly expensive state." It was thus just as well to shore up incumbents. "In 2000 we spent $10 million in California congressional elections. That's money we won't have to spend in California this year."

And given the uncertainties created by Gary Condit's problems in the Chandra Levy affair, the need to hold his seat for the Democrats further reduced the options. Had those uncertainties not arisen, the Democrats might have been able to redraw what's now Republican Congressman Richard Pombo's San Joaquin Valley district to carve out another congressional seat for themselves.

But in the end the most telling reason was probably Burton's. In 1995, the California House delegation was evenly split, 26-26, between Democrats and Republicans. In the three elections since, the Democrats pretty much picked clean the bones of a weak, self-marginalized California Republican Party that had little appeal to women or Latinos.

They knocked off, among others, Bob Dornan, Jim Rogan, Brian Bilbray, and Bill Baker (three of them were beaten by women), filled a couple of open seats vacated by Republicans, and thereby achieved the overwhelming margin they now hold. In effect, they'd come close to maximizing their possible gains.

The potential gains for Republicans in California, as one influential Democratic consultant pointed out, are much greater than those for Democrats. Something similar is true in the Assembly and Senate, where they hold margins of 50-30 and 26-14 respectively.

Last year, Rep. Tom Davis, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, predicted that reapportionment across the nation would give the GOP 10 new seats. If the Republicans retain their narrow majority in the House in November, California Democrats could get the blame from their friends in Washington.

But there was no assurance last summer when the plan was drawn that the Democrats' large California margins could even be maintained, and given the unpredictable politics of the post-9/11 era, there is even less now that George W. Bush, in Tony Quinn's words, "has become the great war-time leader" and when Richard Riordan has a fair chance of bringing a lot of women back into the GOP fold. If there's a strong Republican year, Quinn said, the Democrats might feel pretty good about having played for a status quo of relatively safe districts. "Does [Sacramento congressman] Bob Matsui really want to come home to campaign?"

All this is open to the common charge that all politicians do in reapportionment is protect their own seats -- and thus shouldn't be allowed to get their hands on redistricting in the first place. "Gerrymanders," said a Wall Street Journal editorial, "mean that the voters no longer choose their politicians; the politicians choose their voters."

But in the era of term limits, the legislative stakes aren't nearly as high. Democrats complained that it was hard to get a lot of their Assembly members to pay attention at all. And as Brulte points out, seven of the 14 Republicans in his caucus don't get to run again. The prime objective of his caucus, he said, was protecting the president's majority in the House.

Voters have never worried much about reapportionment, and they may be right. Its political importance, as a Democratic insider said, is probably overrated. Given the constitutional requirements, it's demographic and social patterns, not political gerrymandering, that are the prime determinants of electoral districts.

Without some form of proportional representation, only a few California districts could be made perennially competitive (itself perhaps a dubious virtue). Any major shift of public sentiment, moreover, can knock political strategy into a cocked hat.

What's certainly true is that the civility of the cozy deals of 2001 is no more offensive than the partisan bitterness that followed the 1981-82 plans drawn by Phil Burton and former speaker Willie Brown. You can thank term limits for that, Quinn said. "If there was a loss of institutional memory, there was also a loss of institutional bile." (Hertzberg says some of the civility must also be credited to technology - computer programs and databases that provide information that all the players can agree on and that, in the negotiations, reduce paranoia and permit instant redrawing of district lines).

But it could also be an indication that these days, Democrats are too worried about charges of partisanship and simply not as combative as they were a generation ago. That certainly seemed to be the case in the fight of the Florida recounts after the 2000 presidential election: Bush's Republicans wanted it more than Gore's Democrats.

It may be true even of the famously political Gray Davis. Before the California remap was formally adopted last September, the governor reportedly told House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt that "the voters essentially redistricted by themselves (in November 2000) and my goal now is to strengthen the re-election chances of our new, moderate members."

Phil Burton's reply to that would have been unprintable.

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