Saturday, August 13, 2005
Redistrict my vocabulary
Boring article about constitutional politics. As you probably don't care, Prop. 77, which wants to take redistricting out of the hands of the legislature, is back on the ballot, after being pulled because of a difference in language between the petitions and the wording submitted to the Attorney General.
By a 4-2 vote -- with a Court of Appeal justice on temporary assignment to the court casting the decisive vote -- the justices overruled lower courts that had removed Proposition 77 from the ballot.
Yes, that imported justice cast the deciding vote in a 4-2 decision. Those other three votes didn't actually decide anything. But it gets stranger.
The order was signed by [Chief Justice Ronald George], Justices Marvin Baxter and Ming Chin, and Justice Richard Aldrich of the state Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. Aldrich was selected at random from a group of appellate justices to fill a temporary vacancy created by the June 30 resignation of Justice Janice Rogers Brown, who was appointed by President Bush to a federal appeals court. All are Republican appointees.
Justices Joyce Kennard and Carlos Moreno, the court's sole Democratic appointee, voted to keep Prop. 77 off the ballot. The seventh justice, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, is out of the country.
It's really all the Republicans' and Bush's fault, or so I feel I'm being told. Never mind that apparently one of the Republican appointees also voted to keep it off the ballot. In any case, it was that imported Republican-appointed justice, imported because of Bush, who was the deciding vote. I totally don't understand how this swing votes stuff works. The LA Times wrote nothing about deciding votes and said:
Voting in favor of the order were Chief Justice Ronald M. George, Associate Justices Marvin R. Baxter and Ming W. Chin, and Court of Appeal Justice Richard D. Aldrich, who was named to the court temporarily to fill a vacancy. Justices Joyce L. Kennard and Carlos R. Moreno dissented.
One justice, Kathryn M. Werdegar, was unavailable and did not participate in the case, the court announced.
The court has one vacancy because Janice Rogers Brown has been named to the federal appeals court in Washington.
The Times hadn't played the angle of "this is what it's going to be like when it comes to redistricting," of course, so maybe that was the point behind the Chron's inclusion of vitally important party information and Bush's role.
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