Partisan Battle Looms Over New Congressional Seats : Politics: California is expected to gain seven more House members as a result of the 1990 census.

California’s two major political parties are gearing up for a bitter--and most likely protracted--conflict over how to divvy up the seven new congressional districts that the state is expected to gain as a result of the 1990 census.

Although the new boundaries for the state’s congressional districts won’t be charted for months, the political battle lines--both here and in California--are already being drawn.

Despite talk of a kinder-and-gentler redistricting process by some, hard-line Democrats in the state want to prevent the Republican Party from laying claim to most of the new seats. Republicans, meanwhile, are divided over whether their goal should be to redraw all the lines from scratch--to maximize the party’s gains--or to protect existing lawmakers and then seek as many new seats as possible.

In California, where the fractures of recent redistricting wars linger like a political fault-line within the state’s congressional delegation, party strategists and reapportionment experts are anticipating another knockdown, drag-out confrontation next year.

“The contest is to wear down the enemy,” says Rep. William M. Thomas (R-Bakersfield), the GOP’s congressional point man on redistricting. “We’re Geronimo. We’re Cochise. You fire, and you fall back.”

Ultimately, the real power in reshaping the congressional districts will rest with the state Legislature and governor, which must draft and approve any new redistricting plan. Members of Congress in each party, however, are likely to have considerable input into the process.

Like the battles of Geronimo and Cochise, there is plenty of history to the current struggle. Republicans waged a costly, prolonged fight over the last decade when they unsuccessfully sought to have the courts throw out congressional districts that they claimed were ruthlessly gerrymandered to give Democrats a disproportionate share of seats. And the GOP is still smarting over its failed bid to pass two June ballot initiatives that would have changed the way that districts would be drawn after the 1990 census.

Nowhere in the nation are the stakes higher than in California, where--as preliminary census estimates last week showed--population growth is likely to increase the state’s congressional delegation from the current 45 to 52. GOP dreams of breaking the Democratic lock on Congress before the year 2000 rest heavily on the party’s prospects in the nation’s most-populous state, which will elect nearly one in every eight House members in 1992.

Democrats hold a 28-17 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. Republicans contend that the existing districting plan, masterminded by the late Rep. Phillip Burton (D-San Francisco), all but eliminated partisan competition in most districts and gave the Democrats many more seats than they would have deserved based on statewide voting patterns. Republicans point out that in 180 elections that were held between 1982 and 1988, only a single congressional seat changed hands between the two parties.

But Democrats counter that the Republicans are blaming redistricting unfairly. They say the GOP has failed to field qualified candidates and to mount effective campaigns. They argue that the GOP’s real goal is not to provide for more competition between the parties, but to secure more safe seats for Republican candidates and fewer for women and minorities.

“They want to rip off 12 seats,” says Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), one of his party’s experts on reapportionment.

The fate of next year’s showdown will be determined largely by the California gubernatorial election, which is considered the nation’s most important because of its pivotal role in redistricting.

The Democrats are expected to retain control in November of both houses of the state Legislature, which draws the new congressional district lines. This makes the gubernatorial race crucial because the governor can veto any plan drafted by state lawmakers, with a two-thirds vote in each house needed to override.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s election would give her party free rein in the process. In that case, party strategists say, the Democrats would secure their majorities in all three houses and possibly increase them modestly.

One Democrat familiar with early tinkering with possible new boundaries says that five new congressional districts could be drawn as winnable by Democrats--but only if popular state legislators ran in some of them.

If Republican Pete Wilson were elected, the Democrats would be forced to negotiate or face a stalemate. Failure to override a gubernatorial veto would send the issue to the state Supreme Court, which is dominated by appointees of outgoing Republican Gov. George Deukmejian.

It is expected that the starting point for the Democrats in negotiations would be protection of all incumbents in the state Assembly and the Senate. The same would be true in the congressional delegation, leaving the seven new seats as the focus of negotiations.

“We don’t want the split, the ugly fights, we had as a result of the last redistricting,” says Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), dean of the Democratic delegation and a proponent of increased bipartisan cooperation.

Once the incumbent congressmen are protected, “most of the new seats should go to the Republicans,” Edwards says, citing population growth in Republican-leaning suburbs such as Riverside, San Bernardino, Kern, Ventura and parts of Orange and San Diego counties.

In 1980, Democrats had a 54%-35% advantage among California’s 10.7 million registered voters. The gap has narrowed to 50%-to-39% among nearly 13 million voters today.

Less conciliatory Democrats privately reject Edwards’ analysis. They note that redistricting is based on population, not registration. And even though population growth may have been heaviest in GOP-inclined regions, some previously Republican areas have become more Democratic as city dwellers pushed out into the suburbs, they say.

Republicans also are split. Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), say that a deal with the Democrats that protects incumbents and gives the GOP four of the new seats might be acceptable.

But those are fighting words to Rep. David Dreier (R-La Verne). “That’s totally unacceptable to us,” Dreier says. “What it does is codify the Burton gerrymander.”

Any agreement that protects incumbents rather than undoing the current plan would mean that the Republican Party “would not really be a party,” but merely “a collection of individuals who operated like feudal lords,” says Bakersfield’s Thomas, co-chairman of the GOP House Task Force on Reapportionment. “A number of Republicans, I’m sorry to say, think of it as ‘me and where I’m going to be,’ ” Thomas says. “They do not equate becoming a majority party as being at least equal to their own interests.”

This kind of intraparty tension may surface if Wilson becomes governor. Lewis, a member of the House GOP leadership who prides himself on being able to work with the Democratic majority, says the key to an agreement is an intelligent approach that is “flexible enough to recognize we’re not going to win the whole ballgame” and seeks “a chance for both sides to win.”

The law requires that the districts respect the principle of one person, one vote, which means that each includes the same number of residents (the current figure is about 525,000; with seven new seats, it would increase to about 572,000). They must also conform to the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against minorities by diluting their ability to elect blacks, Latinos or Asians to office.

A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision found that gerrymandering--drawing lines for political advantage--could violate the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of laws.” If an electoral scheme “consistently degrades” the “influence of some voters, it is unconstitutional,” Justice Byron White wrote for the majority in a split decision.

But in that case, involving a redistricting suit brought by Indiana Democrats, the court did not reject the districts. It also refused in 1989 to hear a Republican appeal of a lower court decision, letting the 1982 California lines stand.

Republicans, however, are already talking about putting the U.S. Supreme Court standard to the test again in the 1990s if Feinstein is governor and the Democrats seek to exploit their advantage as they did in the 1980s.