Opinion ID: 1177478
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: The Reapportionment Struggle

Text: A brief review of the current reapportionment struggle reveals why from a policy standpoint it is so essential that the people retain, in its pure form, their constitutional initiative power over reapportionment, even if both a legislative and an initiative plan have been adopted in the same census period. In 1981, following the 1980 census, the Legislature purported to reapportion the legislative and congressional districts, pursuant to a constitutional grant of such power. (Cal. Const., art. XXI.) After charges that this plan (Plan I) was greatly and unfairly gerrymandered, referendum petitions challenging Plan I were promptly circulated and the referendum qualified for the June 1982 Primary Election ballot. At this point, responding to litigation challenging the referendum, and despite clear and applicable precedent calling for a stay of the 1981 reapportionment legislation as to legislative districts ( Legislature v. Reinecke (1972) 6 Cal.3d 595 [99 Cal. Rptr. 481, 492 P.2d 385]), a bare majority of this court, while permitting the referendum to proceed, ordered that the new, challenged and subsequently invalidated voting boundaries applied to the 1982 legislative and congressional elections. ( Assembly v. Deukmejian, supra, 30 Cal.3d 638.) Our action thereby assured that, though the legislative plans might change, the authors would not. At the June 1982 referendum election, the people of California overwhelmingly rejected Plan I. However, because of our ruling, the present Legislature was elected pursuant to the invalid 1981 district boundaries. Those same legislators drafted a new plan (Plan II) and, in January of this year, effectuated it. The challenged initiative before us is intended to replace Plan II. The Legislature, in adopting Plan II, denominated it an urgency measure as to legislative districts. By this device the Legislature effectively prevented the people from once again exercising in 1983 their referendum right to invalidate Plan II. (See Cal. Const., art. II, § 9, subd. (a).) The full import of today's opinion thus becomes manifest. The Legislature precluded the people from another referendum similar to that which last year threw out Plan I. Now the majority of this court not only wrenches from the people their only remaining legal tool, the initiative power, but slams the door to the polling place in the face of the people's attempt to exercise their additional power, also constitutionally protected, to alter or reform their government when the public good requires it. ( Id., art. II, § 1.) Together, marching in lockstep, the Legislature as to the referendum and now this court as to the initiative, have effectively and completely prevented the people from any exercise of their popular will. The unfortunate consequence of today's ruling is that on this matter of great public moment, the people are thereby blocked from expressing through their ballots their own wishes as to the boundaries of the districts from which their legislative representatives are elected. This decision no longer can be made by the people. The Legislature and this court have made it for them. This dubious result is reached notwithstanding the following: constitutional mandates that the people have reserved to themselves all political power, our repeated assurances that the people's initiative is a most precious right, and the absence of any constitutional prohibition whatever against reapportionment by initiative. As a consequence, the ultimate sovereign, the people, find themselves imprisoned within the walls erected by their own servants, the Legislature and this court. This is but the latest chapter in a very unhappy period in California political history. Realignment of voting boundaries, congressional and legislative, has become so volatile, so heavily laced with partisan wrangling and self-interest, that the periodic process has become something painfully to be endured. This has been going on for years. Doubtless there must be a better way. However, it is not for a court to fashion one, but rather for the people, groping for some equitable resolution, to choose the appropriate alternative. In sum, the events of the past few years afford a vivid, precise, and concrete demonstration of the danger of depriving the people of their powers of initiative and referendum. The majority's very unfortunate holding is compelled by neither sound analysis nor precedent.