“Independent” Redistricting Proves Suspect
Devin Nunes
By Susan Crabtree, Real Clear Politics Staff
December 9, 2021
Although they had success last year taking back a few swing congressional districts, Republicans face long, if not impossible, odds winning statewide in blue California. The effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom failed miserably in September and left perennial would-be GOP challengers in a weakened state. Mega-celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger remains the last Republican to win statewide in his 2006 gubernatorial reelection, and there are no potential GOP successors on the horizon.
In just a few weeks, it could become even harder for Republican candidates to win at the local level across the Golden State, thanks to redistricting. The once-in-a decade redrawing of district maps is poised to further decimate California Republican numbers in the Sacramento statehouse and likely in Washington too.
A fierce Donald Trump defender, Rep. Devin Nunes announced on Tuesday he will leave Congress by year’s end to head the former president’s start-up media organization. The decision may not be all that surprising considering just how many Democrats and Republicans have announced their retirements or jumped ship for the private sector in recent weeks.
Still, news of the 10-term Republican’s decision shifted California’s political fault lines, giving Democrats an additional opportunity – this time in Nunes’ Central Valley district. It’s also focusing new scrutiny on the state’s redistricting process as commissioners race to meet a Dec. 27 deadline to finalize the new maps. The most recent draft version of the redrawn map shifted Nunes’ district from solidly red to light blue, which undoubtedly played into his thinking.
Partisan gerrymandering is a time-worn tradition in America, with most states’ legislatures having control over the process. To the victor go the spoils, and that includes making districts more winnable for the party in power. In Texas, for instance, Republicans have a 23-13 advantage in the House delegation. The new GOP-produced map would double the number of safe Republican seats, from 11 to 22, while the number of safe Democratic seats would also increase but only from eight to 12.
Some states, including California, in recent years have tried to take the process out of the hands of partisan officials under pressure to maximize their party’s advantage in order to re-instill public faith in the system. Seven states have commissions on which elected officials may serve while nine others have some form of an independent commission that bars elected officials from direct participation. But partisanship inevitably has creeped in with several states’ remapping processes devolving into political trench warfare. The Associated Press said gerrymandering is “super-charged” because House Democrats have such a slim, five-seat House majority and Republicans sense victory is within reach next year.
The stakes are especially high in California, the most populous state by far and therefore the one with the most congressional seats. The state, however, is growing more slowly than others and will lose one of its House seats because of reapportionment, dropping from 53 to 52. Last year, Republicans managed to win back four of the seven congressional seats that flipped to the Democrats two years prior. But the new unofficial district maps make keeping at least two of those GOP seats, won by razor-thin margins, more difficult.
Reps. Mike Garcia and Michelle Steel, who represent northern Los Angeles County and parts of Orange County, respectively, will be trying to hold on to districts that are three to six percentage points bluer, according to draft maps. The new lines also make the districts for Reps. Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa eight points more Democratic, meaning they will likely turn blue in the future, though they remain light red for now.
For their part, Democrats are losing one Democratic district in Los Angeles because of reapportionment, and they point to slightly higher GOP percentages for the districts of Democratic Reps. Mike Levin and Katie Porter in the new maps, though both won reelection by healthy margins in 2020.
In California, like several other states that passed redistricting reforms, neither party is supposed to have an advantage in the map-drawing process — at least in theory. In 2008, Schwarzenegger helped push through a ballot measure creating a “citizen commission” to redraw the maps after the decennial census. It was promoted as a way to achieve independence — made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four from neither party. But critics say the independent citizen commission label is a façade – that Democrats have an undeniable advantage because the top legislative leaders (all Democrats) have a big role in winnowing the candidates, and a governor-appointed state auditor makes the final selection.
Conservative critics of the process say that Republicans are poised to lose at least a dozen congressional, state Senate and Assembly seats over the next few years because of this Democratic-dominated process.
“This is a Democratic state, and the deck is deliberately stacked,” Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and member of the Republican National Committee, tells RealClearPolitics. “When you look at the so-called Republican commissioners on there, they’re pretty passive, and frankly, they’re not driving the bus.”
“I think Arnold Schwarzenegger and the other proponents of this measure were well intentioned, but now we’re seeing there were not enough safeguards here to ensure a balanced bipartisan board,” she added. “It isn’t balanced, the staff isn’t balanced, and [the commission’s] lawyers aren’t balanced, so the process isn’t balanced.”
Dhillon last week filed a request with the California Supreme Court to fire the redistricting commission’s legal advisers and force disclosure of meetings, as well as privately held research into race-based voting patterns. The emergency petition, filed on behalf of a group of GOP voters, argues that the redistricting commission is “betraying its founding charter” by failing to disclose communications “about redistricting matters with interested parties outside of noticed public [commission] meetings.”
The request also accused the commission of hiring Democratic Party-linked attorneys from the Los Angeles-based law firm Strumwasser & Woocher, pointing out that lawyers working for the commission and their spouses wrote checks of more than $2,000 each to Democratic candidates. The firm has served as legal counsel to leaders of the state legislature, and its website lists work for the campaign of former President Obama in 2008 and 2012.
“It’s hard to imagine a law firm with a greater conflict of interest,” Dhillon said.
Through a public records request, Dhillon and attorney Michael Columbo obtained evidence that members of the redistricting commission had been holding secret meetings, a concern first raised in a sharply worded letter from Charles Munger Jr. to the commission back in May. Munger is a prominent Republican donor who funded the campaign to pass the redistricting ballot measure in 2008 and 2010. Munger argued that the commission routinely flouts the law by meeting with legislative representatives, Google and Common Cause, among others, without public notice.
“The disclosed notes show that [Citizen Redistricting Commission] commissioners were meeting with interested parties to discuss redistricting matters outside the CRC meetings and without making a public record of the meetings,” the legal filing states. “There was thus no public notice and opportunity to participate, comment upon, or know what was discussed, or even that a discussion took place.”
Those outside groups’ support for a single congressional district for most of the San Joaquin Valley could have influenced the commission’s decision to make Nunes’ district far more liberal by including south Fresno. The public had no way of knowing about that input to allow members of the community to respond, critics argue.
The commission’s meetings with outside groups have been a source of suspicion since the inception of the state’s reformed commission in 2011. Good government groups argue that the aim of redistricting is to group “communities of interest” so that residents in a city, neighborhood or ethnic group wield political power by voting together. When it was created, the CRC stressed the need to reflect that reform, and in this year’s process it consistently has pledged to serve these established communities of interest.
Yet, in a deeply reported story in December of that year, liberal-leaning ProPublica found that “in order to get the districts they wanted, Democrats organized groups they said represented certain communities of interest but really represented the party.” The report was titled “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission.”
Another point of current legal contention is a private report analyzing historic racial voting patterns in some parts of California. The plaintiffs want the court to force the commission to release the report, which commissioners have frequently referred to as a resource for drawing maps that comply with the federal Voting Rights Act.
“The CRC is not only violating its constitutionally mandated independence by sharing an incurably conflicted counsel with the legislature,” the legal filing argues, “it is also using its relationship with that firm — on the advice of that firm — to conceal the influential voting district analyses from public oversight, in violation of the law creating the CRC.”
Jane Andersen, who currently chairs the redistricting commission, defended its transparency and “robust” process for seeking outside input while acknowledging it “may not be perfect” and that the COVID pandemic produced an unprecedented delay in the release of the federal census data, creating a condensed timeline for its work.
“This commission has continually been thanked for its demonstrated commitment to an open and transparent process enabling public input throughout the entire process,” Andersen said in a statement to RCP. “…The people of California entrusted the redistricting process to a group of their peers without a blueprint for how to do so. The commission created and executed a robust community input process, which may not be perfect, but was led with integrity and transparency in hopes that it will result in fairer maps for the people of California."
As for the legal filing, she she called it “at best an untimely and unnecessary distraction as the commission presses to finish its important work.”
Carl DeMaio, a conservative talk show personality and activist in Southern California, and a group of San Diego County GOP officials held a press conference Wednesday criticizing the commission’s proposed maps as “partisan gerrymandering” that ignores overwhelming public comment from the community.
DeMaio has said the commission is up to its “old tricks,” favoring the input of “pop-up” partisan groups instead of real members of the impacted communities. San Diegans submitted public comments at a rate of 5.3 times more often than the state as a whole, but DeMaio and other critics say the commission ignored their objections.
Several local officials in San Diego and other civic leaders plan to argue that the proposed Assembly district map splits Asian communities into two separate districts to dilute their more conservative voices. They also point out that it splits up the Chaldean Catholic community, one of largest concentration of these Iraqi immigrants in the U.S., into three separate districts to “eviscerate” their clout, according to a press release.
The revised maps, DeMaio asserted, would result in eliminating one Republican Assembly seat and one competitive seat to give Democrats a four-to-one advantage over Republicans in San Diego County alone.
“A handful of commissioners and staff have cherry-picked random testimony from phony groups and fringe individuals that is completely unrepresentative of feedback contained in the hearing record,” DeMaio said this week in a report for KOGO news radio, which airs his show.
The commission has tried to explain away its undisclosed private meetings as a consequence of a late start in the redistricting process due to COVID-delayed completion of the census. This summer, commissioners asked for more time to complete the process, but the court rejected the request over concerns that it wouldn’t allow enough time for candidates to prepare to run in new districts before the June 2022 primary. In responding to Dhillon’s emergency request, the court could provide more time to finalize the process and allow for more public transparency.
Republicans aren’t holding their breath. If the maps remain the same or similar to the final public draft versions, DeMaio argues the commission will once again sully its founding mission of providing independence to a highly political process.
“If these maps are adopted,” he said, “this commission as a whole — and these individual agitators — will be remembered for corruption and incompetence.”
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.