From Monday’s Los Angeles Times endorsement of Proposition 93:
…we were hoping for something better. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) at least implied that they would join term-limits reform with a measure they don’t like, but that is even more crucial to correcting the state’s broken politics: redistricting reform. They reneged.
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We don’t want to reward Nuñez, Perata or the rest of them for being babies about redistricting. They should have put it on the ballot. But what encourages them to be such big babies? In part it’s their limited tenure, which empowers the political party lawyers to press for the status quo on districting, and encourages the legislative leaders to hang on to whatever power they do have.
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Redistricting, meanwhile, is out of the Legislature’s hands and will be before voters in November, when they can finish the job that the Assembly and Senate couldn’t handle.
Brian Leubitz of Calitics says: “…the Times editorial makes the argument that I’ve been (at least attempting) to make on Prop. 93 for a while. It’s not perfect, but it puts California in a better position for the long run.” See also the California Majority Report.
The Reporter of Vacaville agrees with the Times:
Others are miffed because it fails to address the state’s redistricting problems . . . Proposition 93 may be guilty to some extent of all of this, but those are no reasons to reject it.
As blogger Fetching Jen says, however, most papers have had a different opinion:
15 major newspapers across the state – the San Diego Union-Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, Riverside Press Enterprise, Orange County Register, Fresno Bee, Bakersfield Californian, Long Beach Press-Telegram, San Bernardino County Sun, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Torrance Daily Breeze, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Modesto Bee, the Woodland Daily Democrat and the Tracy Press have all now come out in opposition to Propostion 93.
The latest newspapers to oppose the misleading Proposition 93 are the Sacramento and Modesto Bees (finally!), the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and the Orange County Register.
Scroll through our redistricting archive for more. For instance, the latest editorial from the Merced Sun-Star: “Nunez and Perata’s idea of leadership is to mint a ballot measure that helps themselves stay in power and leaves the real problems, like redistricting, unaddressed.” Or the latest from insidebayarea.com:
Legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once said he would oppose changing term limits without also changing redistricting — the way lawmakers draw up their own legislative districts — have reneged on that pledge.
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