Cavala: Competitive Legislative Seats Do Not Produce “Moderate” Lawmakers

Cavala keeps referring to Prop 11 as the “Governor’s Scheme”, as if Arnold wrote the initiative. He didn’t. Prop 11 was written by the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, those stealth “right-wing” outfits. But let’s take a closer look at Cavala’s argument, that Democrats should apparently fight anything the Governor supports or opposes.

If Arnold’s support for Prop 11, or anything else, is so bad, then perhaps Democrats should support off shore drilling. After all, Arnold has a scheme to oppose drilling off the coast of California, and don’t we have to be against the governor and his scheme?

Perhaps Democrats should support Prop 8 and ban same sex marriage. After all, the Governor has a scheme to oppose Prop 8 and, thereby, support same sex marriage. His scheme must be bad. Blah, blah, blah.

The point is that Cavala is blowing smoke in the voter’s face. He hopes they won’t see that gerrymandering legislative districts is dishonest government. He hopes that the voters won’t see that gerrymandering is a way of rigging elections. He hopes they won’t understand that gerrymandering, the way Cavala did in 2001 during the last redistricting, is a way to cancel democracy.

But the voters are learning. Almost every major newspaper in the state has endorsed Prop 11, including the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Major organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP, and the League of California Cities have endorsed Prop 11. Democratic leaders, Democratic clubs, Democratic candidates and such luminaries as Erwin Chemerinsky have endorsed Prop 11.

Don’t let Cavala, or anyone, blow smoke in your face. Gerrymandering is dishonest. Prop 11 will end gerrymandering.

Prop 11 is an attempt by the diminishing white majority to avoid relinquishing power to the emerging non-white majority of Californians. Democrats draw districts to enable the election of minority candidates--Prop 11 has criteria which will vastly diminish these types of districts. Prop 11 proponents claim the Voting Rights Act will prevent discrimination but in actual fact the VRA has been decimated by the Supreme Court and does not protect minorities to any significant degree. While Cavala and George see this in terms of partisanship what is really being argued about is how California assimilates the new Californians--do we provide them with the opportunities that allow success in this society or do we accept a permanent underclass? The latter is the attempt by Republicans to create an aristocracy of wealth, the former is in keeping with a millenia of further expansion of the rights of man.

So, let’s see………Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are trying to protect the diminishing white majority from having to relinquish power. That’s probably the single most ridiculous argument that’s been made by the pro-gerrymandering side.

Gerrymandering isn’t about distributing power amongst emerging minorities. It’s about protecting incumbents, and it has been wildly successful.

Prop 11 is about removing an incredible conflict of interest where legislators draw their own districts and select their own voters. It’s about returning a basic power to the people – that the voters should decide who represents them.

And, please…….Let’s not have anymore of that deceitful cliché that the voters already decide who to vote for. The districts are fixed and the elections are rigged.

Prop 11 will eliminate gerrymandering.

Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are run by white well-off liberals who don't have a clue about what it is like to be a minority. None of the brown or black former Speakers of the Assembly are for Prop 11, Hertzberg, the lone white Democrat, is. Sense a pattern?

Uhm... actually the heads of California Common Cause and the LWV are both Asian-American, the fastest growing minority group in California. So yeah, the pattern I see is that you're clueless.

Also, you don't seem to realize that minorities saw their biggest gains in California after the 1990 redistricting when the Special Masters, instead of the Legislature, redrew the lines. Incumbent Democrats don't care about electing minorities, they care about re-electing themselves.

BlueStater2008 obviously has adopted the Republican narrative of tokenism (aka as the "Clarence Thomas" gambit). Putting a minority in charge of an organization otherwise run by whites is an obvious ploy (and Asian-Americans are not underrepresented minorities either).

As for the "gains", they would have happened under the districts which were vetoed by Wilson. The gains came primarily from demographic change and term limits removing the old legislators. Minorities access to power, however, took a dramatic hit during the Pringle interregnum. Were the districts to be drawn by the Prop 11 commission you would see the rule of white men in the Assembly, just like you do in the Senate.

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