Bottom Line #1: You can't separate Arnold Schwarzenegger's "neutral" redistricting plan from the larger Republican strategy of creating a permanent majority by changing the field of play. Schwarzenegger's plan is part of a pure Republican power play, just as much as the Republican redistricting of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida and Tom Delay's infamous redistricting of Texas.
In order to understand why Proposition 77 is a bad idea, one has to understand a bit about redistricting generally. As a general matter, each state is redistricted every ten years, after the national census shows the current population of the state and where the citizens of the state are located. The last nationwide (and California) redistricting was in 2001. Delay's 2004 vivisection of Texas was a radical exception to this bipartisan understanding, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is following suit.
For the most part, redistricting is done by state legislatures, both for their own districts and for the districts for the US House of Representatives. (There are a small minority of states where neutral commissions draw the district lines -- I'm aware of Arizona, Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington state.) It is unsurprising that the district lines become political footballs. There are some judicial and legislative constraints placed on the drawing of district lines, but they're fairly weak. So, states with Democratic legislatures have some degree of Democratic party preference in the district lines, and the same for states with Republican legislatures.
If California's redistricting plan only affected the California state legislature, it would still be a bad idea (for reasons I'll explain later this week), but it affects the US House districts as well, which makes it double-plus-ungood. Remember that Republicans have already gerrymandered Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas. Expect them to continue with that behavior in every state in which they control the legislature.
Arnold Schwarzenegger knows that California won't have a Republican legislature any time soon, so the best he can hope for is taking California's redistricting out of the hands of the Democrats. The master PR stroke is selling it as "neutral" and "fair". It's neither, and it's a flawed plan, but even if it were truly fair, it would still not be neutral in context. In order to even approach "fair" in the larger context, implementation would have to be contingent on a Republican-controlled state (or states) with a number of US Representatives roughly equal to California's also adopting a similar neutral plan.
I don't see that anywhere in Proposition 77. Does anyone else?
Republican gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states and theoretical neutrality in Democrat-controlled states means an increase in the Republican majority of the House of Representatives. In the 2004 elections, Republicans gained 5 net House seats, all in Texas, almost entirely as a result of Delay's Texas gerrymander.
"Neutral" in California is rabidly Republican in the national context. Don't be fooled.
No on Proposition 77.
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