Remap Process No Longer a Narrow Political Concern

Conservative Republican Alan Heslop and liberal Democrat Leroy Hardy are political opposites. But on one thing they agree: the California Legislature is a mess.

Heslop and Hardy have concluded that the state’s many ills--from skyrocketing insurance rates to gridlocked roads--are the fault of a Legislature paralyzed by partisan extremists elected from districts carefully drawn to maximize the power of incumbents and other insiders.

The two veteran political scientists have more than 50 years combined experience helping their parties hold power or seize it. Now they say they are disgusted by what they have wrought and want a change. They want to take the most political of tasks--the drawing of district lines--out of the hands of the politicians.

“What brings us together is a common understanding that this cannot go on,” Heslop said of his unusual alliance with Hardy. “Too much is jeopardized by a process in which politicians are like rogue elephants, trampling down everything in their path. We have killed off competition in California.”

Heslop and Hardy are not alone. Across the state, groups and individuals are clamoring to change the way that congressional, state Senate and Assembly district lines are drawn. At least half a dozen ballot initiatives have been proposed. All either would take the job away from the Legislature or set new standards aimed at trimming the majority party’s power to draw lines that suit it.

There is much at stake. Republicans complain that the Democratic reapportionment of 1982 robbed them of several seats in the Legislature, possibly enough to give the GOP a majority. Democrats, however, insist that Republican-backed plans would result in decreased representation for the poor, minorities and women who traditionally have been Democratic constituents.

Caught in the middle are everyday Californians who, polls show, neither know nor care much about reapportionment. But, according to at least one poll, when they are asked if it is fair to allow politicians to create the very districts in which they run, the answer is a resounding no.

The sponsors of most of these “reform” measures say that the lawmakers have made themselves so immune to challenge that they have lost touch with the needs of their constituents.

The Legislature once consisted of people who made their living elsewhere and came to Sacramento in their spare time to do the public’s business. But, for 23 years, being a lawmaker has been a full-time job and a career of its own. This transformation, once hailed as a reform, has bred a government dominated by lifetime politicians, many of whom never have held a full-time job outside of politics.

A review of the lawmakers’ backgrounds shows that 35 members of the current Legislature started as aides to other legislators and worked their way up the political ladder. Although 20 years ago only 11 members considered themselves full-time politicians, now more than one-third of the state lawmakers--42 out of 117 (there are three vacancies)--say their public office is their only occupation.

The easiest way to stay in office, every partisan politician knows, is to come from a district where voter registration leans heavily in your party’s favor. The key to achieving that is reapportionment.

Reapportionment--or redistricting, as it also is called--is the deceptively simple process of grouping voters into political districts. While it may seem a straight-forward enough task to take thousands of homes and draw a box around them on a map, the process is a delicate art that can make or break political fortunes.

Today, the Democrats hold a comfortable 46 to 33 advantage over Republicans in the Assembly and control 24 of the 40 seats in the Senate. But reapportionment experts in both camps say that, given a free hand, they could redraw the lines so that the Republicans, not the Democrats, would control state government.

Except for the Supreme Court requirement of one-person, one-vote, which means that each member must represent roughly the same number of people, the map-drawers can do anything they wish, and they usually do. The guiding principle in a partisan reapportionment is to disperse your own party’s voters and consolidate those of your opponent. By doing this, you can place just enough of your party’s voters in each district to capture it. Meanwhile, the opposition wins a smaller number of districts, but by huge majorities, thus “wasting” many of its votes.

To accomplish this, politicians for nearly two centuries have been using the “gerrymander,” named for Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts who in 1812 drew districts designed to preserve his party’s control. An artist aptly compared one of Gerry’s districts to a salamander, and an editor dubbed the beast a “gerrymander.” The name has stuck ever since.

Leroy Heslop and Alan Hardy are two of the state’s leading experts on this game. Heslop, an Oxford-educated native of England, is the former executive director of the California Republican Party. As director of the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College, he helped the Republicans gather and crunch data for the 1970 and 1980 redistrictings, both of which were controlled by the Democrats.

Hardy, a political science professor at Long Beach State University, is a lifetime reapportionment junkie. He worked for the Democrats who reapportioned the state after the 1960, 1970 and 1980 censuses.

The two academics say they shared a mutual disgust with the 1982 reapportionment, which was viewed widely as a bipartisan plan designed to protect incumbents by creating “safe” districts for nearly every member of the Legislature and Congress--Democrat and Republican.

The 1982 plan was the Legislature’s second try at a reapportionment based on the 1980 census. The first plan was rejected by the voters in a Republican-sponsored referendum. But the Legislature changed it only slightly and rushed it to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., who signed it into law just before leaving office.

“The will of the people was totally disregarded in 1982,” Hardy said. “I find that repugnant.”

Added Heslop: “Here was a getting-into-bed of the Republicans and the Democrats to engineer a massive trade to the benefit of both sides.”

The 1982 scheme has been so successful in protecting incumbents from serious challenge on Election Day that it has become fashionable among critics to compare the California Legislature to the Soviet Union’s Politburo.

Since 1984, incumbents in the state Senate, Assembly and California’s congressional delegation have won 393 races and lost only 7. The results in most of these contests could have been predicted the day the ballots were printed: there have been 188 races in which the winner has collected 70% of the vote or more, while in only 18 elections has the margin been as thin as five percentage points.

The districts that produced such lopsided outcomes look like pieces in an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Many have long, narrow necks connecting distant population centers. Some of these corridors have been known to run down freeway medians, under water or along a strip of sandy beach. Many districts have boundaries that have divided cities or neighborhoods in an effort to include or exclude Republicans or Democrats.

The would-be reformers say such districts are the inevitable result of allowing politicians to dictate their own constituencies. The solution, they say, is to take the job away from politicians or write rules that tie their hands so that only a “fair” reapportionment plan can result.

Unless the law is changed, the Legislature will begin drawing the new districts in early 1991. The reapportionment will be based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1990 count of the California population, which must be handed over to the governor by April 1, 1991.

Perhaps the most far-reaching of the proposals to change the system is one sponsored by San Mateo County Supervisor Tom Huening and the League of Women Voters. The initiative, which also was endorsed by anti-tax crusader Paul Gann before his death last September, would create a 12-member commission to consider independently produced reapportionment plans and choose the one that best fits a set of strict criteria outlined in the ballot measure.

Huening, a charter member of California Common Cause, said he believes voters will embrace the commission approach even though they rejected similar concepts in 1982 and 1984. A California Poll taken in May showed that voters care little about reapportionment until they are told that the party in power typically uses the system to its own advantage. So informed, those surveyed disapprove of the practice by a margin of 82% to 10%.

“Having legislators redraw their own districts is an inherent conflict of interest,” Huening said. “I don’t care how good or how noble or how ethical the people are who are drawing the districts.”

Backers of three other plans are also seeking to qualify measures for the June and November ballots.

The “Legislative Ethics Enforcement Initiative,” sponsored by San Rafael businessman Gary Flynn, would enact a series of restrictions on the conduct of lawmakers along with a requirement that any reapportionment plan be approved by two-thirds majorities in the Assembly and Senate and be ratified by the voters.

That measure, Proposition 118 on the June ballot, is supported by Assembly Republican Leader Ross Johnson of La Habra, who at one point was sponsoring his own initiative but dropped it in favor of Flynn’s proposal.

Sen. Bill Leonard (R-Big Bear) is pushing an initiative for the November ballot that would simply require at least half the districts to be “competitive,” which he defines as having party registration figures within 2% of each party’s statewide share of the voters. Leonard says that only 21 of the 165 Congressional, Senate and Assembly districts now meet that standard.

Another proposal, sponsored by political novice Ken Gow, an electrical engineer from Whittier, would require that the redistricting be done by a computer programmed to respect already recognized borders, including county lines, city limits and mountain ranges.

Hardy and Heslop are not backing any of the proposed initiatives but have put forth their own method, which could be used by any map-drawers but probably would have its best chance of working under an independent commission or a court-appointed special master.

They say their scheme is designed to be a dry, nonpartisan process driven more by common sense than politics. In short, the plan envisions compact districts formed by the systematic grouping of geographical units defined by boundaries such as county and city limits, freeways and mountain ranges.

But Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), whose fate as Assembly leader could hinge on the outcome of the next reapportionment, says that so-called “nonpartisan” plans contain a bias as long as they deprive the majority party of the right to draw the lines. He accuses Hardy, who like Brown backed Democrat Jesse Jackson for President in 1988, of trying to further the Republicans’ desire “to gain control by line-drawing rather than by political competition.”

“They are trying to sell (their plan) as objective,” Brown said. “But there was a subjective judgment made that this is a better way to do it.”

The Speaker maintains that there is nothing wrong with allowing lawmakers to draw their own district lines. This is simply one of the many powers with which voters have entrusted their representatives, he said. If he is still Speaker when the post-1990 reapportionment is done, Brown said, he will ask each member to draw his or her own district and then vote for the plan without concern for how the rest of the state is treated.

“I believe each incumbent should represent his district,” Brown said. “His constituency sent him there to vote on murder, on rape, on taxes and on reapportionment. And he should reflect his district’s views.”

Republicans, of course, see it differently. Under the current, Democrat-controlled reapportionment, Republicans won 47% of the vote in all Assembly races combined in 1988, but they won only 33 of the 80 seats in the lower house. Democrats won 51% of the vote, the equivalent of 41 seats, but they actually captured 47 seats.

Heslop said that in many cases, longtime incumbents would be tossed out of office if his plan is put into action.

“My personal hope is that we will see a dramatically different result--a result where past is not prologue,” Heslop said. “I hope we are going to see a shake-up.”