California voters are in for quite a surprise when they head to the polls in 2012: competitive congressional elections and possibly unfamiliar names on the ballot.
A new electoral map drawn up by a panel of ordinary citizens and criticized as creating too many districts for minority representation has dramatically changed California’s political landscape. Members of Congress who’ve held their seats for years are now scrambling to figure out their political futures.
“We’re going to have more competitive elections in November than this state has seen, probably in two decades,” political expert Allen Hoffenblum told Fox News.
Hoffenblum says if the result of previous redistricting was that it protected incumbents, the error with the citizens’ map is that it is heavily skewed to racial demographics.
“We went from a political gerrymand to a racial gerrymand. That the commission became overly conscious of drawing seats on race. The Latino seats, the black seats, the Asian seats. And in the process of creating these districts based on race they divided counties, they divided cities and split cities.”
The Electoral College could be inching closer to extermination as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Monday that would award the state’s 55 electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.
The bill would take effect only if the states that hold a majority of the 538 electoral votes approve similar legislation. With California’s addition, that total now stands at 132, almost 49 percent of the 270 needed.
Under the electoral college, people don’t actually vote for president. They vote for electors, who then vote for president. It was developed as a compromise between those who wanted Congress to elect the president and those who wanted the president elected by popular vote.
At a recent fundraiser for the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama 2012, I spoke with Sheriff Joe Arpaio from Maricopa County, Ariz. Arpaio is called “America’s Toughest Sheriff” because of his unyielding stance in dealing with illegal aliens and other criminals. People tend to love him or hate him, but it cannot be denied that he is unflinchingly a man of conviction and action.
The event, billed as “An Evening with the Joe’s,” also included Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher and Joe Miller from Alaska. All three “Joes” contributed their time to the event in conjunction with the “Our Country Deserves Better” PAC.
The venue was the beautiful Pellegrini estate in Montara, and although the vaulted ceilings were impressive, the acoustics were terrible for an interview. Arpaio and I ended up tucked away on a knobby couch in a recreation room replete with a well-worn bear rug on the floor and a pool table. The only noise was the occasional creak of the door when someone poked their head in and the persistent “chirp” of a smoke detector mounted too high on the wall for me to disable. I suppose I could have asked Arpaio to shoot it, but that might have caused a stir. Or, given his reputation, perhaps not.
A federal appeals court put same-sex weddings in California on hold indefinitely Monday while it considers the constitutionality of the state’s gay marriage ban.
The decision, issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, trumps a lower court judge’s order that would have allowed county clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Wednesday.
Chief U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker decided last week to allow gay marriages to go forward after ruling that the ban, known as Proposition 8, violated equal protection and due process rights of gays and lesbians guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
