CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“LATINO FEARS ON LOSS OF CLOUT MAY BE VALID”
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“LATINO FEARS ON LOSS OF CLOUT MAY BE VALID”
Fear and anxiety have been in the air
around California’s Latino political leaders in the weeks since the U.S.
Supreme Court announced it will hear arguments next fall in a Texas case
challenging the 51-year-old legal and political doctrine of one-person,
one-vote.
These fears may turn out to be far
more valid than other recent scares for one party or the other.
The Texas case challenges the notion
that congressional and legislative districts should be drawn with equal
populations, regardless of the composition of the populace in each. That was
the precept dictated by the Supreme Court in the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims,
which based its reasoning on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution,
guaranteeing equal protection of the rights of all persons under United States
jurisdiction.
The challenge maintains only U.S.
citizens eligible to vote should count when drawing districts, thus
leaving out children of all ethnicities, legal immigrants waiting to become
citizens and many others, including undocumented immigrants. The undocumented,
of course, are the main targets of this effort.
It’s facile to say that because
Democratic fears over creating the Citizens Redistricting Commission that
designed California’s current districts never panned out, the current Latino
fears will also come to nothing. In fact, Democrats control the California
congressional delegation and both houses of the state Legislature by the same
or larger margins under the new redistricting system as they did when state
legislators drew the previous districts.
But some basic numbers suggest the
change sought in the Texas case seems likely to create enormous change. And the
current Supreme Court has shown it’s willing, almost eager, to retreat from
previous signal laws like the Voting Rights Act.
In
California, the consequences of a ruling supporting eligible-voters-only
population counts could be enormous. They could propel Republicans into a much
more equal status in California than the party now enjoys, despite the GOP’s
dismal performance in registering new voters.
For instance, it now takes many more
votes to win election to Congress in a reliably Republican district than in
almost any Democratic district currently represented by a Latino politician. In
2014, for example, Lucille Roybal-Allard won election with just 24,227 votes in
an East Los Angeles district with about 250,000 residents. At the very same
time, less than 50 miles away on the Orange County coast, Republican Dana
Rohrabacher won election with about 85,000 votes. Democrat Xavier Becerra, also
from East Los Angeles, was reelected with 34,000 votes in that election, while
Republican Carl DeMaio polled more than 75,000 in San Diego, but lost his race
to Democrat Scott Peters.
The pattern was the same in races for
both houses of the state Legislature.
If the Supreme Court OKs the Texas
measure, things would change radically for Latino politicians who now
benefit from the fact that their districts have low populations of potential
voters compared to more conservative Anglo and African-American ones with many
more who are eligible.
The main consequence would be that
districts would shift in a major way, parts of the currently
Latino-dominated ones being incorporated into more conservative nearby
districts. That could lead to increased competition for seats long held by the
many-termed likes of Becerra and Roybal-Allard.
There’s also the strong possibility
states like California, Texas and Florida would lose substantial numbers of
congressional seats to other states far from the Mexican border which draw many
fewer undocumented immigrants. Because the undocumented are counted in every
state’s population for determining how many seats in Congress a state will get,
places with large numbers of illegal immigrants would likely lose seats and
northern states like Wisconsin and Minnesota and Ohio and Massachusetts, with
relatively small numbers of immigrants of all types, would gain.
The change would also see a massive
redistribution of federal grant money for everything from highways and sewers
to parks and airports, all now determined in large part by state populations.
Those services are used by everyone who lives in a given area, not just those
eligible to vote.
Which arouses many kinds of fears over
this potential change, especially because some Supreme Court justices began
musing along similar lines as far back as the mid-1990s.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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