It’s How We Slice the State That Counts : Legislature: State lawmakers aren’t crazy about term limitations, but what really scares them is fair apportionment of districts.

Two initiatives proposed for next year’s statewide balloting include provisions to limit how long California legislators could occupy their seats. The idea has an illusory appeal, but limiting the terms of lawmakers would be treating the symptoms and not the underlying diseases that have afflicted the state Legislature during the 1980s.

What is needed much more than term limitations is reapportionment reform. Getting new faces into the Senate and Assembly is a laudable goal, but it won’t result in any real change if the new members represent the same or similarly gerrymandered election districts.

Today’s Legislature is not representative of California as a whole, but most of its members accurately reflect the warped districts that elected them. The legislative and congressional districts produced by Democratic majorities in the Assembly and Senate in 1981 and 1982 and signed into law by outgoing Democratic Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. are the artificial creations of political craftsmen.

Democrats sought to make most of the districts safe for themselves by making a minority of the districts supersafe for Republicans. Cramming all the registered GOP voters possible into as few districts as possible makes the other districts more likely to elect Democrats. As a result, the state Capitol often has become an arena where conservatives and liberals are too busy fighting old wars to recognize much need for new ideas.

If lawmakers were elected from districts that either party had a chance of winning, they would be much more responsive to moderate, or swing, voters who would encourage lawmakers to look beyond old ideologies. If they didn’t, the voters themselves, and not the state Constitution, would be likely to call an end to some legislative careers. But moderate voters are badly underrepresented in today’s Legislature, and the proposed term limitations would do nothing to increase their power.

As much as state legislators may dislike the thought of term limitations, they fear reapportionment reform even more. So while they’re unhappy with Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp for sponsoring a legislative ethics reform initiative that includes a provision to limit a lawmaker’s tenure in any one seat to 12 years, they generally manage to keep their anger within bounds.

That’s partly because the term limitation would not be an immediate threat, even if it wins voter approval. Since prior service would be excluded, no incumbent would be automatically ousted from his or her legislative seat until the year 2002.

But it’s also because Van de Kamp, who is the front-runner for the party’s 1990 nomination for governor, represents the best hope the Democratic legislative majorities have for again controlling the reapportionment process in 1991, when districts must be reshaped for the rest of the decade to reflect population changes.

As governor, Van de Kamp would be in a position to sign whatever gerrymandering plans are sent to his desk by Democratic legislative majorities. Those majorities are expected to remain intact after next year’s elections.

If the attorney general’s push for reform had included a proposal to change the reapportionment system by taking it out of the hands of the lawmakers, the Legislature’s majority Democrats would have been in an uproar. But they find Van de Kamp generally reassuring on that score. He argues against proposals to put reapportionment responsibilities in the hands of an independent commission, saying that the process is best left to the Legislature itself.

He vaguely denies any willingness to give the Legislature a blank check on reapportionment. When asked if he would veto a gerrymandering plan that went to extremes, Van de Kamp said he would “reserve the right to intervene in the process. I think the governor should have a role.”

Van de Kamp would be unusual if he tried to make that role meaningful. Whenever their parties have held majorities in the Legislature, most governors have been satisfied simply to sign whatever reapportionment plans their fellow partisans put on their desks. That’s been true no matter how outrageously unfair the plans might have been to the opposition--or to moderate voters who suffer most from gerrymanders.

Assembly and Senate Democrats count on him to do the same.