This is a short and sweet election in California. There’s one thing on the ballot: Prop 50. Vote yes.
Gerrymandering sucks and should be illegal. A better Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional.
In California, a 2008 proposition changed state legislative boundaries to be drawn by a bipartisan commission rather than by the party controlling the legislature. In 2010, this was extended to cover Congress as well.
Nobody reasonable disputes that this is a good approach to drawing legislative boundaries, or that the maps we’ve been using aren’t fairer than in most legislatively-controlled states. Nothing in Prop 50 will change this approach for the California State Assembly and State Senate, and the only change that will be made is temporary.
The effect of the California approach is to provide fair districts for the California legislature, and to provide fair districts for California’s Congressional districts. This is great for the former. But when it turns out that there’s one party that is pro-gerrymandering and one party that is on the whole anti-gerrymandering, it’s put us in the situation where “some states have fair districts and some don’t” has the actual outcome of favoring the other party.
Right now the House is 219-213 Republican to Democrat. The only reason Mike Johnson is Speaker of the House is because of gerrymandering — the difference of 5 representatives is fewer than the amount of seats that unfair maps skew Republican in GOP-controlled states.
And this is under today’s maps: not the even worse maps that many states are putting into place this year, making their already gerrymandered maps worse.
Unilateral disarmament has failed. California has shown the country how one can produce fair Congressional maps — we can hope for a federal law requiring that (which Prop 50 explicitly supports). But we’re not going to get there tying our hands behind our maps letting only blue states have fair maps.
Prop 50 leaves the fair maps in place for the state legislature. And fair Congressional maps will come back for us after the next census (Prop 50 only affects the 2020s). But state-level Congressional de-gerrymandering has failed. If you want to live in a country with national anti-gerrymandering laws, you at the very least need a Congress not controlled by Republicans. But the status quo will make that impossible.
Vote yes on 50. California will continue to demonstrate fair legislative boundaries in our state legislative maps. But let’s give the country a fighting chance of ever breaking the full Republican control of the federal government.