Governor's Redistricting Initiative Could Screw Up the Budget Process Even More

By Steven Maviglio

July 14, 2008

One of the great myths of "reforming" redistricting is that it would provide for the election of more moderate legislators that would be more responsive to their constituents. The reasoning, as the proponents of the Voters First initiative believe, would be that since candidates would have a competitive election, they'd have to work on more moderate solutions to the state's problems.

Like the budget. Imagine if there were a dozen more "competitive" seats, and that somehow, moderate candidates would survive the primaries of their respective parties (which, mind you, will never happen since moderates fair poorly in primaries) and find their way into the legislature.

So here comes a dozen or so centrist candidates, all of which know that each and every vote would be eyed by their political opponents. Do you think, for a minute, that any Democrat or Republican would then have the guts to vote for the kind of taxes we need to balance the budget? Of course not. If they did, they'd be tarred and feathered by their Republican opponent. Would a moderate Republican stand for the kind of cuts that GOP leaders are proposing? No, because they'd be attacked up and down by their Democratic opponent for being meanspirited.

So that means you'd have Schwarzenegger-like budget "solutions" that make little sense, but play to the political winds. And you'd have split caucuses on both the right and the left as the struggle to get to two-thirds would be even more difficult.

What a nightmare.

As we see in Congress as well as in our own legislature, legislators from competitive districts seldom are leaders. They have to spend most of their time looking over their shoulder to see what their political enemies are up to, and the rest of the time they have to raise campaign cash to pay for their expensive "competitive" races. That's not exactly a recipe for leadership.

The Voters First initiative would result in more campaign spending, more timidness among elected officials, and more complications to the budget process. If Common Cause hadn't sold out to Gov. Schwarzenegger's fundraising cronies, it could have done something meaningful this election cycle: eliminate the 2/3 budget approval threshold. That would improve public policy in our state far more than redistricting ever will.