Senator Ashburn proposed a Constitutional Amendment to lump a number of political reforms, including redistricting, into one package. Sen. Ashburn has been a long advocate of redistricting reform and was an author of SCA 3 in 2006, the reform measure that passed the Senate but was held up in the Assembly. The LA Times article… Continue Reading
Author Archives: Rose Institute
Common Cause/League of Women Voters Support Redistricting Reform
The California Progress Report has a letter by Joanne McKray, a State Board Member of Common Cause and active in the California League of Women Voters. Part of the message is here, the rest below the fold. Gerrymandering is a long-standing tradition in US political history. It is not a time-honored one, because it makes… Continue Reading
City of Pasadena Endorses Voters FIRST Act
Steven Cischke’s article in Pasadena Now reports on the Pasadena City Council’s vote in support of the Voters FIRST initiative. Nesting was a big issue during the vote and the relevant section is below: The districts are to respect communities such as neighborhoods, cities and counties; be compact and, where possible, be nested so that… Continue Reading
Utah Reform Effort Blocked By GOP
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Jennifer Francis has an article focusing on a rookie legislator, Rep. Rebecca Chavez-Houck, and her attempt to reform the Utah redistricting process: The other bill smothered in Rules would have created an independent redistricting commission to replace the highly partisan fight that now occurs in the Legislature every 10 years. The… Continue Reading
Spitzer Scandal and Redistricting
Spitzer was a strong supporter of redistricting reform in New York. A press release from the Governor’s office in April includes Spitzer and the Lt. Governor at the time, David Paterson, supporting “A constitutional amendment creating an independent redistricting commission to determine congressional and legislative apportionment. Members of the eleven-member commission will be appointed by… Continue Reading
Pasadena Star-News Endorses Reform
The Pasadena Star-News has an opinion article supporting the Common Cause led reform effort. One section directly counters Dan Walters’ recent article: [The commission] sounds better to us than earlier proposals that always fell back on the idea of a so-called “panel of retired judges” who would do the cartography. Judges, in our experience, tend… Continue Reading
Dan Walters’ Reform Critique
Dan Walters has a piece in the SacBee about the current reform initiative. He clearly sees the need for reform but doesn’t believe the commission is the right way to go about it. The two problems he highlights are 1) the absence of congressional districts and 2) that random commissioners may not have the expertise… Continue Reading
The Sacramento Bee's State Salary Database
Phillip Reese of the Sacramento Bee recently wrote an article, based on publicly available data the paper puts into a salary database, that included nuggets like this: As of February, about 17,500 permanent, full-time state employees made six-figure base salaries about one of every 14. When November 2003 wages are adjusted for inflation, that number… Continue Reading
Local Goverments Allowed to Buy Back Bonds?
From John Hill’s article in the Sacramento Bee: The state Assembly tried to send some relief to local governments reeling from higher interest costs Monday with approval of a bill that allows cities, counties and other bond issuers to buy back their own bonds. *** Markets for two types of municipal bonds have been hit… Continue Reading
National Redistricting News
The Washington Post has an editorial in which they talked to President Bush on the polarization of Congress. The entire story is a good read, but here are a few key points: …members of Congress are ‘worried about taking a rational position’ because they fear being punished in primaries by challengers questioning their ideological purity.… Continue Reading