A recent exposé that shows how Democratic Party operatives manipulated the California Citizens Redistricting Commission must have the politicians and their henchmen chortling in Sacramento and in Washington.

The report by ProPublica, a non-profit New York-based news operation, proves conclusively that one of the two major parties used less-than-honest means to influence a public hearing process that determined how congressional district lines were drawn in California.

What a shock!

The key nugget on which the ProPublica story relies is a clutch of emails obtained from a congressional aide who convened a meeting in Washington last spring to discuss how to influence the new nonpartisan redistricting process that state voters had approved.

"Never say anything AT ALL about redistricting, … " the emails ProPublica obtained from the aide warn. "Anything can come back to haunt us."

So, what grand plan did Democrats concoct to insert themselves improperly into the redistricting process?

They recruited party allies, labor leaders, voters, community organizers and local elected officials. Some of them then created phony grass-roots groups who then represented themselves as "communities of interest." Their suggested maps, as presented to the commission, just happened to mirror the interests of the Democratic Party.

No one should condone a party's attempt to hijack a public hearing process, but it is hardly surprising that such tactics were deployed. Yet ProPublica goes further by suggestion the commission unknowingly aided in this plot. In their naiveté, commissioners refused to "even look at data that would tell them how prospective maps affected the fortunes of Democrats or Republicans," ProPublica reported. "This left the commissioners blind to the sort of influence Democrats were planning."

Yet should the commission have legally considered party registration in drawing its maps? Stan Forbes, the commission's chairman, says the answer is no. "The commission was barred from drawing districts in consideration of incumbent candidates or political parties," Forbes wrote in a formal response to ProPublica. "To reference political party registration numbers would have looked highly suspicious to the public."

The real mystery here is: Where were the Republicans? Why didn't they try to influence the process of an independent commission whose creation they supported?

The fact is, they did, but not very effectively. In its response to the many responses to its story, ProPublica details one bumbling effort by a Republican congressman to influence his own district remap. But it concludes that as a whole, "Republicans were far less organized and effective than Democrats."

In an interview, Forbes stated that the reason Republicans didn't fare well in redistricting has more to do with the simple fact that "Republican registration has gone down by a significant percentage (over the past decade). … If that happens you lose seats."

Anyone who was paying attention understood that California's new redistricting process was not going to be free of partisan politics. In fact, the law requires that members of both major political parties sit on the redistricting commission.

Still, this year's political remapping effort was far better than the gerrymandered process of a decade ago, in which incumbents from both parties colluded behind closed doors to draw their own safe districts.

Republicans can whine all they want, and they will have their day in court challenging the commission's state Senate maps.

But all their harping about the ProPublica findings makes them sound like sore losers in a redistricting board game they helped create, but can't seem to master.

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