By: Rep. Kevin O. McCarthy
from “politico.com”

Outrage spread through America when Major League Baseball players were found to have been injecting themselves with steroids, giving some athletes an unfair advantage over the competition. Fundamentally, the fans felt misled by the performance of those “juiced-up” players and did not believe that hard work alone was the primary reason for their statistics. Like Major League Baseball steroid use, a similar unfair advantage is taken by California incumbent politicians.

How? Simply put, politicians in the party controlling the state legislature can gerrymander legislative districts, “juicing-up” electoral results by drawing districts to cherry-pick voters of the same political affiliation, with little regard to whether those gerrymandered lines respect established communities and neighborhoods. Some politicians make “locker-room deals” to lavish themselves and their congressional colleagues with safe voter registration margins, denying voters the opportunity to truly hold politicians accountable through competitive elections.

The American ideal of representative government relies on politicians winning based on the power of ideas, ability and trust — not solely party identification. It’s a perversion of that ideal when we allow politicians to win through unfair advantages, by injecting their own district with a large quantity of voters of the same political affiliation or, worse, “corking their bats” by cutting deals that perpetuate this unfair advantage in other districts to maximize the number of representatives of one party who are sent to Congress. Have we become too jaded to ask: Why should the interests of the incumbents or the political party outweigh the interests of the people?

It is vital that we bring accountability back to the ballot box. We can take an important step in restoring the principles of democratic representation to California by taking the power of drawing electoral districts out of the hands of the politicians and putting it in the hands of the citizens. The effort to empower the voters of California must overcome opposition from strong Republican and Democrat incumbent officeholders. But as the 2003 gubernatorial recall election demonstrated, people can rise above the interests of entrenched politicians.

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