CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--What does the U.S. Supreme Court have against Los Angeles?
Quite a bit, to judge by recent oral arguments in a case challenging how legislative districts are drawn in the U.S.
The case involves a Texas challenge to the longstanding principle that legislative districts should have the same number of people in them. And people means everybody, not just voters – children as well as adults ineligible to vote because they’re non-citizens or felons. The Texas challengers are rural folks who say this discriminates against them, since diverse urban districts often have more of these non-voters, meaning that it takes fewer votes to win in cities.
Of course, if the Supreme Court finds for the challengers and imposes their preferred solution – equalizing districts by the numbers of voters — it would be hard to find a place more affected than Los Angeles.
There are often relatively few voters in L.A.’s most diverse precincts. And turnout in L.A. is so low that politicians can win elections there with very votes. One result of an adverse ruling would be to give Los Angeles and its people – particularly its children and its undocumented immigrants – much less representation.
It’s hard to see the justice in that. Voters aren’t the only people who need representation.
(Joe Mathews is Connecting California Columnist and Editor, Zócalo Public Square, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It [UC Press, 2010]. This column was posted first at Fox and Hounds)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 101
Pub: Dec 15, 2015
