Dan Walters: Would redistricting reform make Capitol more collegial?

By Dan Walters

September 10, 2008

Arnold Schwarzenegger's drive to strip legislators of their power to redraw their own districts is seizing on the record-long state budget impasse as campaign fodder for Proposition 11, which would shift redistricting to an independent commission.

The budget stalemate is proof, the Proposition 11 campaign trumpets and some newspaper editorialists echo, that unyielding partisanship is poisonous to the public and that the measure would create a more collegial and productive ambience.

The 2001 redistricting was a gerrymander that locked in the partisan ownership of virtually every legislative and congressional district in the state. And with legislative primaries dominated by the rigidly ideological activists in both parties, legislators are almost entirely very liberal Democrats and very conservative Republicans.

The budget impasse is the product of many factors, some dating back decades and beyond the control of officeholders. But one big one, certainly, is bedrock ideological conflict over whether to close a $15.2 billion deficit with new taxes, as Democrats want, or spending cuts and loans, as Republicans insist.

Schwarzenegger positions himself as a centrist who's willing to raise taxes temporarily, along with some spending cuts, to bridge the gap, but he's been utterly unable to win support from legislators of either party, despite public appeals and carrot-and-stick gestures.

Would shifting redistricting to an independent commission result in a Legislature with more Schwarzenegger-like moderates and thus one able to reach productive compromises on the budget and other thorny issues?

At first blush, that sounds logical, but a lengthy new study by the Public Policy Institute of California throws cold water on the assertion. It says that detailed studies of voting patterns before and after the 2001 gerrymander don't show any widening of the Legislature's already yawning ideological division.

"There was just as much partisanship in the late 1990s as there was in the mid-2000s," a co- author of the study, Eric McGhee, said. "Redistricting did not make California legislators more partisan. They were partisan to begin with."

The PPIC study appears to be valid as far as it goes, but it really doesn't go far enough because it's based solely on floor votes on bills and does not - and, in fairness, could not - delve into other aspects of the legislative process, such as what happened in committees.

It could not, for instance, quantify the influence that moderate Democrats in the Assembly, led by then-Speaker Robert Hertzberg and dubbed the "mod squad," wielded. Many business-opposed bills were short-circuited before reaching the Assembly floor, angering liberal groups.

PPIC missed the mark on this one. The Legislature is clearly more polarized than it was a decade ago. Whether Proposition 11, which has its own flaws, would moderate the Capitol is another question to ponder.