Panel Democrats Lash Voting Measure Backers

Representatives of the League of Women Voters walked into an ambush and were dealt a verbal hammering by angry Democratic members of a Senate committee on Wednesday.

The outburst occurred without warning at the conclusion of a hearing on a campaign finance bill when the Democrats began assailing league witnesses for their sponsorship of a proposed reapportionment ballot initiative.

The ballot measure would take the task of reapportioning political districts away from the Legislature and give it to a commission. And, because it involves political survival, reapportionment is about the dearest thing to the hearts of incumbents.

Initiative Supporters

Many legislative Democrats regard the initiative as a Republican scheme to win majority control of the Legislature. In addition to the league, the plan is supported by Republican financier David Packard, anti-tax activist Paul Gann, retired Legislative Analyst A. Alan Post, a Democrat, and its architect, San Mateo County Supervisor Tom Huening.

As testimony wound up on the campaign finance bill, Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles) suddenly blurted out to the league witnesses: “I don’t want you to talk to me again. I’m not interested.”

“You are either fools or dupes as an organization,” joined in Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), suggesting that the league did not understand the contents of the initiative.

Sen. Bill Greene (D-Los Angeles), a black who represents Watts, asserted that the league consists of “lily white, middle-class people” who “do not represent anything that comes from Watts, South-Central, Compton or Southeast L.A. From the standpoint of my constituency, I have no responsibility or compulsion to pay any attention to you.”

Seemed Taken Aback

At one point, committee Chairman Milton Marks (D-San Francisco) interjected, “I’d like to say I agree with everything that has been said.” Marks also is chairman of the Democratic caucus.

The league representatives at the witness table seemed taken aback by the surprise attack, but calmly defended their backing of the initiative, especially against a charge that legislators were not consulted about the league’s sponsorship of the proposal.

“We do not feel we have left you in the dark,” Trudy Schafer, the organization’s legislation director, told the committee. She said reapportionment had been studied carefully and discussed by the league for some time before it decided to back the “very moderate” initiative.

Lockyer told Schafer that the “practical impact (of the ballot measure) will be to shift power to the right wing of the Republican Party.” Rosenthal agreed, telling league witnesses that legislators elected in districts drawn because of the measure “will never support the issues you stand for.”

For the most part, the league witnesses sat quietly at the witness table looking stunned as one Democrat after another lashed out at them. If backers of the reapportionment measure secure enough valid voter signatures, it will appear on the ballot in 1990.