Long Beach Congressman Proposes Bill to End Gerrymandering

By Samantha Katzman

Congressman Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) is fighting to take the politics out of redistricting with his first authored bill “Let the People Draw the Lines Act.” If passed, the act will create new districting laws throughout the country. Lowenthal introduced the bill in early August.

Last year in California, for the first time district lines were drawn not by a state legislature as they had been in the past, but through a public process. Only a handful of other states, such as New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Iowa, and Maine, have similar systems with advisory commissions appointed to help counsel the legislature and offer drafts of district lines. In more than 35 other states, redistricting is done by the state legislature with gubernatorial veto rights, which can often lead to gerrymandering, where politicians draw district lines in a way that ensure their party remain in power, Lowenthal said.

Lowenthal’s bill is meant to set undeviating national guidelines for redistricting that require independent citizen panels to redraw the district lines each decade, and he is using California as his example. The goal is to remove some of the congressional politicking and give power back to the voters, he said.

“Voters should pick their politicians, instead of politicians picking their voters,” stated Karen Hobert Flynn, senior vice president for strategy and programs at Common Cause, a nonprofit advocacy group for open government. “Congressman Lowenthal should be commended for his efforts to ensure that voters have true choices at the ballot box.”

While assisting in the 2001 redistricting during his second term in Congress, Lowenthal witnessed firsthand the amount of underhanded politics that were involved in the process, he said. The state legislator at the time redrew congressional district lines to eliminate a popular Long Beach Republican congressman’s seat.

“I thought it was outrageously bad,” Lowenthal said. “I thought there was a lack of trust in the state already between people, they now disenfranchised everybody and the districts did not represent communities of interest, but self interest.”

“If my bill becomes law,” Lowenthal said in his address to the House of Representatives on Aug. 2, “political gerrymandering will finally become a closed chapter in our nation’s journey toward a more perfect democracy.”

Though hopeful the bill will pass, Lowenthal is not confident that it will.

“California is a progressive state and it took so long to get it done in California so I don’t think something like this is going to sweep the nation,” he said.

It is also because party members on both sides oppose the bill because their power will being taken away and put back into the hands of the voters, he said.

“You’re asking people to give up power,” Lowenthal said, “That’s like telling a kid something is good for them and they don’t believe it.”

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) is one representative not in support of the bill, and doubts that it will pass, Rohrabacher’s chief of staff Rick Dykema said.

“It is Congressman Lowenthal imposing his ideas on the rest of the country,” he said. “It’s very unlikely that the bill will pass. It’s just one member of congress’s idea of how every state should conduct their business.”

Congress is in recess for the month of August and will resume in early September. If the “Let the People Draw the Lines Act” is passed, it will go into effect after the 2020 census.

Lowenthal represents California's 47th district, which includes the cities of Long Beach, Lakewood, Signal Hill, Avalon, Los Alamitos, Rossmoor, Cypress, Westminster, Garden Grove, Buena Park, and Stanton.