How California ‘good government’ types handed Congress to bad-government Republicans

In the past week alone, California’s own Kevin McCarthy looked on as he was pointedly bypassed by police officers and families being recognized for protecting his hide at the Capitol last year; found occasion to jeer the release of basketball star Brittney Griner from Vladimir Putin’s clutches; and saw his endlessly embarrassing quest for the House speakership threatened by an uprising within the lunatic fringe he has carefully cultivated.

It’s bad enough that California gave the country such a politician. What’s worse is that the state’s self-appointed, self-adulating and self-deluded “good government” advocates may have given McCarthy the House.

Now that the Republicans’ much-vaunted “red wave” has sloshed ashore as so much pinkish froth, Republicans have actually lost a Senate seat and barely eked out control of the House. If the GOP had won just five fewer seats, McCarthy would be fighting to remain minority leader rather than grab the speaker’s gavel.

As it happens, more than twice his party’s paltry national majority will hail from what should be the Democrats’ most formidable stronghold, California. And, sure, California is a huge state full of conservative hinterlands that are bound to send a few Republicans to Washington. But a dozen?

Republicans have been unable to come close to a statewide office in Sacramento for over a decade and have been confined to a powerless legislative minority for longer. And yet the state will generously allocate nearly a quarter of its congressional delegation to the GOP.

For this, we can thank our independent redistricting commission, comprising an equal number of Republicans and Democrats drawing congressional and other districts according to high-minded principles that are being roundly ignored throughout the rest of the country.

The state’s voters were hoodwinked into this preemptive surrender of their own political power by our last Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and countless chattering-class allies who proclaimed it the very yellow brick road to better government. And it certainly could be if such reforms hadn’t remained largely confined to Democratic-leaning states even as their Republican opposites, abetted by a reactionary Supreme Court, gleefully gerrymandered their way into power.

If the California Legislature’s Democratic mega-majority were still in the business of drawing districts the way their counterparts do in Texas and Ohio, according to several expert analyses, they could have easily won the five more seats it would have taken to keep McCarthy and company safely in the minority.

This should be a bracing moment for all the assiduously “centrist” politicians and pontificators who are so concerned with quaint appearances of evenhandedness that they might both-sides us all the way to the wrong side of democracy. Their promised good government is looking pretty bad.