Revisit Those Strange Lines in the Sand

Give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger his due. Just as he promised during his election campaign, he spent last week traveling the length of California trying to use his media visibility and popularity with the voters to pressure the state Legislature into approving a complex and controversial budget recovery plan. What next? Going on Jay Leno’s show to make the case for more state highway construction?

Kidding aside, there is something admirable about the governor using his celebrity to get voters to focus on the details of governance. That’s why it is time for Schwarzenegger to follow through on another pledge he made during his campaign: to rethink the very important but blatantly political way legislative districts are drawn.

Reapportionment is done every 10 years using the population statistics generated by the decennial census, and it may be the only topic more arcane than the budgeting process.

It has long been a common practice for politicians to try to control reapportionment to their advantage. In fact, the slang term we now use for drawing oddly shaped districts -- gerrymandering -- dates from the early 19th century when a Massachusetts politician named Elbridge Gerry drew up a legislative map for his state that blatantly favored his long-forgotten political party.

But reapportionment is arguably the most important thing the nation’s 50 state legislatures do. The lines they draw can affect every political decision those bodies make for the rest of the decade. They also affect the makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives because state legislatures draw the House’s district lines as well.

Nowadays, using computers and detailed demographic data, political operatives can design districts that are virtually guaranteed to elect either a Democrat or a Republican, depending on how the lines are drawn. But most often incumbent politicians of both parties draw the new lines to protect themselves.

That’s a big reason more than 90% of the House’s 435 members get reelected every two years without meaningful competition. And that’s why reapportionment is too important to be left to the politicians.

Only last week, the Colorado Supreme Court intervened to toss out a blatantly partisan reapportionment plan. State Republicans had pushed it through earlier this year in an effort to guarantee continued GOP control of Colorado’s statehouse and potentially of all seven of Colorado’s House seats. (The current breakdown of Colorado’s House delegation is five Republicans and two Democrats.)

In attempting this political sleight of hand, Colorado Republicans had to cast aside a nonpartisan reapportionment plan drawn up in 2002 by a federal judge in Denver. Colorado’s high court ruled that the state’s constitution mandated one, and only one, reapportionment per decade, nullifying the GOP’s transparent power grab.

It is still uncertain whether the Colorado court decision will have any effect on an even more bizarre reapportionment battle in Texas.

That political food fight got some attention earlier this year when Democrats in the Legislature fled Austin for Oklahoma and New Mexico -- thereby denying a quorum -- to delay an attempt at gerrymandering by the Texas GOP. Eventually a second, pro-Republican reapportionment was forced through, but it is being challenged in the courts.

Of course, here in California the Democrats have shown they can be every bit as cynical and manipulative at reapportionment as the Republicans. In 2001 they struck a private deal with the GOP minority in Sacramento to pay a notorious Democrat political operative, Michael Berman, a whole lot of money to draw up a redistricting plan that would give incumbents in both parties safe districts.

However, those ultrasafe seats also helped create the political gridlock and nasty partisanship that now exist in Sacramento and that Schwarzenegger has repeatedly said he wants to change.

That’s because incumbents with safe districts face little pressure to compromise with members of the other party and may even feel the need to stick to their ideological guns lest they anger the extreme conservatives or liberals who elected them. Which means that the moderate middle, where most American voters come down on most issues, gets the least representation.

The governor would go a long way toward changing the current culture in Sacramento, and to some extent even in Washington, by following up on a statement he made often during his campaign: to take a fresh look at how the Legislature reapportions itself and perhaps give the job to an independent citizens commission.

I like that idea a lot. It is similar to how Iowa reapportions its districts, which is a key reason that tiny farm state saw more competitive House races in 2002 -- four -- than California and New York combined.

So go for it, Guv. Changing reapportionment could be an even heavier lift than the state budget. But you have lifted a few weights in your time.

Frank del Olmo is associate editor of The Times.