Redistricting: A New Game on Spring St.

In the old days, powerful lawyers and business tycoons pulled strings from their Spring Street offices and watched legislators in faraway Sacramento dance like marionettes.

A phone call from Spring Street to the state’s most famous lobbyist, Artie Samish, was all it took to pass a bill or kill one.

The old fixers are all gone from downtown Los Angeles, part of a distant past when Spring Street was Los Angeles’ financial and political heart. Even Samish’s massive frame is dust, forgotten except by us students of the shady side of California politics.

A half-century after that gaudy era, I went to an office building at 634 S. Spring St. Monday to cover a legislative issue that would have been totally incomprehensible to the departed influence peddlers.

My destination was the 11th floor, now the headquarters of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national civil rights organization that has taken the lead in forcing adoption of redistricting plans to reflect the huge increase in California’s minority population.

That’s the part that would have surprised Spring Street’s old tenants--the idea of anyone wanting to expand a power base. It was always their goal to keep power to themselves, to create a body of law permitting them and their clients to make more money.

I was there to attend a press conference held by representatives of MALDEF and other civil rights organizations to remind the Legislature that the redistricting bills that soon will be unveiled in the Capitol must reflect the new demographic realities of California. “We don’t believe the Legislature will do its best . . . to create districts that reflect California’s diversity,” said Arturo Vargas, a MALDEF attorney.

A prime target for this message was America’s most powerful African-American state legislator, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

That made sense. While both Senate and Assembly districts will be transformed by redistricting, the 80 Assembly districts offer minorities more opportunity to get officials elected than the Senate’s 40. And the Assembly bill will be written, directed and produced by the Speaker.

You’d think that Brown, who came up the hard way from Texas’ poorest black neighborhoods, would welcome MALDEF’s message--that it might even be unnecessary for him to be reminded of the need for more minority Assembly members.

That would have been true of the Willie Brown I met in the 1960s.

I was a junior reporter without high-placed sources. He was a poor and powerless freshman legislator. We’d occasionally have a sandwich or coffee in the Capitol cafeteria, sharing complaints about the conduct of big shot senior reporters and politicians.

From those humble days, Brown rose to big shot senior status himself, from the cafeteria to the best table at Frank Fat’s, the Capitol’s power hangout, from an outsider to the immense authority of the Speakership. He won by weaving a complex web of alliances with lawmakers ranging from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans. Today, his allies include conservative Republican Cathie Wright of Simi Valley, and Democrats Richard Katz of Sylmar and Sally Tanner of Baldwin Park.

He’s got to take care of these supporters, assuring them that he’ll maintain district boundaries that will get them reelected.

That’s a problem when it comes to Katz and Tanner. Brown’s obligations to them conflict with the aims of MALDEF, the Asian-Pacific American Legal Center, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights organizations.

Katz’s San Fernando Valley district and Tanner’s San Gabriel Valley territory are becoming increasingly Latino. In addition, the Asian population in Tanner’s district is growing fast. Although Brown wants to protect Katz and Tanner, the federal Voting Rights Act mandates district boundaries that improve minorities’ chances of winning.

No problem, said Katz, a Brown ally who is confident of winning with new district lines. “We’re putting the Voting Rights Act above incumbents.” But the civil rights groups are unconvinced.

This is more complicated than anything that faced the old Spring Street lawyers and their man, Artie Samish. All they wanted was to kill beer, wine and liquor taxes and give breaks to the industries they represented.

Only insiders cared about redistricting in those days. That was even true in the ‘60s when Speaker Brown was first elected. California was not the racial stew that it is today.

The new Spring Street lawyers are engaged in an epic transformation of the Legislature. Brown must accommodate himself to that and, at the same time, preserve his political power.

There have been many transactions between Spring Street and Sacramento, but none quite like this one.