CA State Senate Thinks It’s Normal … NOT

I’ve not been writing much since Election Day because 100 plus hour work weeks tend to stifle one’s creativity, and my business always comes first. In that a large part of my workload has been directly affected by redistricting in the Congress and State Legislatures I thought I’d regale you with some of the absurdity that modern politics has created.

We have states that held their elections with their new districts only to have them struck down and now they’ve rolled back to their old districts. In essence people voted for legislators in November that do not represent them today.

We have states that have legislators sitting in districts that have been declared unconstitutional by the courts so they will have to create all new districts for the 2014 elections, at taxpayer expense of course.

We have states that reintroduced floterial districts, a practice thought to be extinct after the 2000 census but au contraire, where certain portions of the state have individual districts and other districts that overlay the individual ones.

But the winner, without even a close second, is the California State Senate. From their website that attempts to explain the utter lunacy they have created (emphasis is mine):

Due to redistricting, Senate districts have a unique issue that Assembly and Congressional districts do not have. Of the Senate districts established by the Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2011, only the odd-numbered districts went into effect for the 2012 election cycle. The new even-numbered districts will go into effect for the 2014 election cycle, and the even-numbered districts previously established by the 2001 redistricting will continue to exist until 2014. These unique circumstances create some areas of overlap between the old and new districts (“accelerated areas”) and some areas without coverage (“deferred areas”). For the 2013-14 Regular Session of the Legislature, each accelerated area essentially has two Senators representing the area and each deferred area has none. The Senate Committee on Rules will assign a Senator to provide appropriate constituent services to each deferred area. This is a normal consequence of the redistricting process.

The words alone are confusing and idiotic enough but the pictures, just one of which is below, are even more absurd and lunatic.

Now there are 23 other states that have staggered elections in their Senates, where half of the districts are up for election every two years, and they all did the normal thing. They simply adopted their new districts where the Senators running in 2012 ran in the new districts and the other half began to represent their new districts on the first day of the Senate session. This plan actually gives the legislators due to run in 2014 an opportunity to meet their new constituents before asking for their vote for reelection, and has the added benefit of not exposing the stupidity that has become pervasive in today’s political arenas.

Take a minute and look at the California State Senate website and if you agree that their solution makes sense and is normal, kindly do me the service of not relocating anywhere near my farm. Thanks!