The whole thing is distasteful. Not so long ago, I voted for a proposition that was supposed to make California Congressional districts less gerrymandered. After living through the decade of 2000-2010 when pols had engineered incumbent protection districts of which only one changed parties over that span, voters were ready for a non-partisan redistricting commission. So we passed such an arrangement by initiative. And Congress districts were subsequently a little more fairly drawn according to proximity and affinity characteristics. Dems still won most of them, because California is a very Democratic state. But the voters got what we aspired to.
Now, in response to Trump's power madness, we have to suspend our redistricting commission and reorganize districts to give the Dems as much power in Congress as is possible.
I'll outsource the explanation to that old curmudgeon columnist for the Los Angeles Times George Skelton. He doesn't much like Prop. 50 either, but he knows necessity when he trips over it.
[Prop 50 is] about exerting some control over unhinged President Trump. That would happen if voters across America next year flip the House of Representatives from Republican to Democrat, ending one-party rule of the federal government. Proposition 50 could help do that.
Does an obedient Republican Congress continue to allow Trump to walk all over it? Or does a new Democrat-led House exercise its constitutional duty to provide checks and balances over the executive branch?
This is what’s potentially at stake in California’s special election on Nov. 4.
... Trump pressured Texas Gov. Greg Abbott into orchestrating a mid-decade legislative gerrymandering of his state’s House districts, with the aim of gaining five more Republican seats. The president has also been browbeating other red states to rig their congressional lines.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly retaliated. He asked an eager Democrat-controlled Legislature to draw up new House maps designed to gain five new Democratic seats, neutralizing Texas’ action.
... Unlike in Texas, Newsom needs the voters’ permission to resume gerrymandering. That’s what Proposition 50 does, along with granting voter approval of proposed new weird-looking congressional maps drawn by Democratic lawmakers.
... Proposition 50’s opponents contend Democrats can’t be trusted to keep the gerrymandering temporary.
And they’re hypocritically screaming about a “Newsom power grab” — without also pointing the finger at Trump and Abbott, who started this fight.
At its core, this is a brawl over raw political power. Forget any idealism.
... “Gerrymanders are a cancer and mid-decade gerrymanders are metastasis,” [opposition funder Charles] Munger wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month.
If Democratic politicians gerrymander California, he asserted, “then they lose the moral high ground.”
Well, if this is the moral high ground we’re living in under the Trump regime, I’d like to move to another level.
My definition of a moral high ground doesn’t include a Congress that won’t push back against a bully president who cuts back millions in research aid to universities because he doesn’t like what they teach, who sics his own masked police force of unidentified agents on California residents, who sabotages our anti-pollution programs.
... We should all play by the same rules — even if it unfortunately requires temporary gerrymandering. After Trump leaves, we can return to the high road.
Okay, I admit it. I am thrilled that the new scheme might endanger GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, millionaire car alarm crook and entrepreneur, whose tenure in Congress has been far too long.
But largely, I just think Californians have to do it to attempt to preserve some check on Trump's autocratic rule.
YES on Prop. 50
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