Via LGM, The Editors, so far as I'm concerned, get the redistricting scheme right:
I agree that this is a great proposition, and I urge the voters of Texas to pass it. Oh, wait. The problem with this proposition, and the reason it was proposed by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, is that it asks the largest Democratic state not to redistrict for partisan gain while Republican states redistrict away, with help from the Republican Congress. Net result: a gain in reps for the Republicans on the national level, and endless headaches of the sort we've all come to know and love over the past decade. As far as I'm concerned, 77 and 75 are the two non-negotiable items on the agenda, as they are the most explicit attacks on Democratic political funding and leverage.
Now, this would be wrong if it was a fairer redistricting bill. That is to say, the party in power will always lose out from redistricting, having California pass such a bill makes similar initiatives more likely elsewhere, and so it makes sense that we'd take a slight hit in CA for large gains (not to mention a fairer process!) across the nation. But since the bill, with its weird "compactness" schematic, looks to be an attempt to use the urban/rural divide to reduce the potency of Democratic votes and increase the power of Republican ballots, it seems exactly the sort of powergrab The Editors tag it as. (On the other hand, Harold Meyerson makes the point that CA's urban districts are fairly compact already and, looking at the map, he seems to be right. So maybe this won't have the affects some of us fear.). In any case, it's a very tricky choice, as having the party in power force the party out of power to make these fair process concessions on the few pieces of turf it controls really smacks of disingenuousness.
