The High Cost of Folly

It’s appropriate that the historic redistricting lawsuit against Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors ended, as the poet wrote, not with a bang but a whimper. It had limped along painfully for way too long.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court finally killed any hope county supervisors had of winning it. The end came quietly, but it was definitive. The high court routinely announces on Mondays what cases it will hear. The rest are passed along without comment, which is what happened to the county’s appeal of the redistricting suit. It had already lost the case before a federal judge in Los Angeles and an appeals court in San Francisco, both of which concluded that supervisors had deliberately diluted the Latino vote to protect their incumbencies.

None of the five current supervisors are utterly without blame for what happened. They all helped draw up the 1981 redistricting plan the courts threw out. But the case could have been settled long ago if any one of the board’s Republican majority--Mike Antonovich, Deane Dana and Pete Schabarum--had been willing to do it. They refused, and claimed they were standing up for legal principle and trying to keep the county from coming under the control of spendthrift liberals. Well, these “conservatives” shelled out $6 million in tax revenues just to protect their own political power--and all the bills aren’t even in yet.

Worse, the board majority fought on despite warning signs that they would lose. While the original lawsuit was filed by civil rights activists, it was eventually joined even by the Reagan Administration’s Justice Department, which was hardly aggressive about enforcing civil rights. And all along the appeals process, judges known for their conservative legal views agreed with U.S. Dist. Judge David V. Kenyon’s findings of discrimination. Even the Supreme Court joined in, when it refused last month to delay the special election being held under Kenyon’s order in the newly aligned 1st District.

So while Antonovich, Dana and Schabarum try to promote a fiction that they had no choice but to fight the lawsuit to the bitter end, that just ain’t so. And we all will pay for their folly.