Posted on 11/05/2010 12:36:40 PM PDT by SmithL
California legislators of both parties, then-Gov. Gray Davis and the George W. Bush White House made a pact with the political devil nine years ago by fixing outcomes of legislative and congressional elections for a decade.
They agreed to redraw the boundaries of 120 legislative and 53 congressional districts to declare party ownership of each, lock in the partisan status quo and lock out real choice for voters.
Since then, through five election cycles, there have been 765 legislative and congressional elections in California and in only about 15 of them have voters managed to overcome the intent of the bipartisan gerrymander. That's a 98 percent success rate.
It's evident why Republicans liked the deal. It protected them against a potential partisan gerrymander by the Democrats.
Why Democrats went along with it remains something of a mystery, but at least one reason is that it protected white Democratic congressional members from challenges by Latinos.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor in 2003, he made redistricting reform a top priority, and finally succeeded in 2008 with a ballot measure, Proposition 11, that shifted legislative redistricting to an independent commission.
Proposition 11 backers omitted congressional districts due to threats from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others to kill it.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
California extended the reform to cover congressional districts.
It will be run akin to boundaries commissions in Canada. To pass redistricting plans for each of the four elected entities in California, will require 9 votes out of 14 on the commission.
Three Democrats, three Republicans and three Independents must agree to approve them. If they deadlock, a California Supreme Court master will draw the final district boundaries.
Its the end of partisan gerrymandering in California.
Based on election returns from California last Tuesday, I don’t even think redistricting reform can help the state GOP. While I was thrilled with the national results, California proved to be a total disaster with Gov. Moonbeam returning to the governors mansion and that awful obnoxious leftwing twat Barbar Boxer getting another six years in the senate. In addition to that, mindless drone CA voters defeated every single Republican running for statewide office.
In addition to all of this, CA is now one of the most solid blue states in the nation as blue as NY, MA, VT, or RI with registered Dems outnumbering registered Reps by two million. And Californian truly do have their heads firmly embedded up their rectums. Would you believe that in CA, a state over run with millions of illegals, does not even bother checking ID when you go to vote?
Watch for the “independents” to be Democrat-leaning/actual Dems.
Mrs. RQSR, and myself of course voted for Whitman as she was NOT Jerry Brown, and of course we voted for Fiorina, because she wasn’t Boxer.
Wondering, but will never know how this would have turned out had we Republican candidates that were truly interested in doing the job for California.
You, myself, everybody has seen, heard a crooner sing a tune before. The singer’s that get to be popular sing the song as though they meant every word, every note of that song as though that song was straight from their heart. They get up on that stage like Leslie Uggams on Mitch Miller back in the late fifties, early sixties singing “Birth of the Blues” when she was only 16, and let it rip sending cold chills throughout your body, and adrenulin running in your heart. WOW! She got my vote for life.
We didn’t have anybody like that running against the professional Politicians here in California. They might just as well vote for the Dems as opposed to Ahnold in a skirt, or the lady that almost bankrupted H. P.
I voted for those ladies, so did my wife, but we knew all along Brown was going to win. Those ladies did NOT sing the song the way it should have been sung.
Add to this the passage of the so-called ‘open primary’. Yeah, right, not open for the voter, just open for the politicians. Instead of voters being able to vote for anyone in any party, the politicians get to not list a party, or pick an ‘affiliation’ and instead of candidates for the general election coming from the top vote winners of the different parties [who receive enough votes] it is now the top 2 vote winners who become the general election candidates. Given CA, that means that in effect the only candidates we will see in a general election most of the time will be dems, progressives, liberals.
Not sure this is good for the Republicans in CA... they have actually done better than their numbers because of this particular gerrymander.
You can know. The results would have been the same. No conservative Republican will ever win state-wide office in CA again unless demographics revert to 1970. I doubt that any RINO (Arnold despoiled that title) will ever win. The Republican label, and especially Republican conservative label has become anathema in CA for reasons spelled out in numerous posts in this and other threads. CA has jumped the shark.
Under a gerrymander, Republicans have safe seats for their incumbents but no real incentives to pursue a majority. It made them fat, lazy and spoiled.
Competitive elections will force them to try to run candidates all over the state not just in areas where they had a built-in advantage.
Can the CAGOP compete? That’s a very good question in view of their sub-par performance in statewide races. The party either needs to grow a pair or it can disappear.
Disagree. Had they wanted to do the job, really do the job they would have sold themselves better. They would have targeted the truth, clamped onto it, opened up the door to Jerry Brown’s closet, and Bab’s Boxer’s closet, and exposed every damned skeleton with detail. They did not.
Yes, as I have posted myself the State has become a welfare, on the dole, centralized government State, with many voters beholden to government just like the Dems are trying to make our entire Nation, but failure is on those that don’t see the path, and take it, and those two ladies weren’t interested enough to really get in there, and do the job of campaigning. They threw money at it, lots of money at it, but they didn’t throw themselves at it.
At least we have this redistricting policy now, and a friendlier Congress.
My prediction: California goes broke (already is). Congress refuses funding to bail it out. Constitutional crisis ensues.
Is this jeenyus REALLY asking why the Rats went along with a gerrymandering plan that virtually guarantees that the incumbent will not lose to a member of the opposite party?
But who gets to nominate the members and who approves them?
I agree with all of that. Everyone knows Brown admitted to lying and it didn't hurt him much. And Boxer is hideous. Where I disagree is the contention that that doing the above would have gotten the repub canidates elected in CA. The Dem/Union machine is brutal. And one must remember that illegals can vote there.
btt
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