Professor James T. Bennett has just published “Stifling Political Competition: How Government Has Rigged the System to Benefit Demopublicans and Exclude Third Parties.” The publisher is the prestigious Springer Company, which is the world’s largest publisher of books on science, technology and medicine. Springer has published over 150 Nobel prize-winners. Professor Bennett is an Eminent Scholar at George Mason University and holds the William P. Snavely Chair of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Economics Department. He is the founder and director of the Journal of Labor Research.
I’m getting it. I would greatly appreciate a review in depth by Richard Winger.
There is such a review in the printed Jan. 1 2009 Ballot Access News, arriving in most subscribers’ mailboxes today.
January 12, 2009
MEDIA RELEASE
Disrepresentation Lawsuit To Be Heard on 21st
On December first, 2008, thirty three year old Santa Barbara, CA citizen Michael C. Warnken filed suit in US District Court in Sacramento on behalf of all Californians. Case number 2:08-CV-02891-LKK-EFB is set to be heard on January 21st, 2009 in Dept. 25 of the US District Courthouse in Sacramento. The hearing is concerned with the defendants’ ( State Attorney General, Secretary of State, the Assembly and the Governor ) “Motion to Dismiss.”
Warnken’s case concerns the representational integrity of California’s Assembly districts. He contends that the size of the current districts at 475,000 has grown far too large to be representative under our current 80 member Assembly. He points to the fact that California’s Assembly has been expanded several times since its founding in the 1800s, and says further expansion is now long overdue.
California started out in 1850 with 36 Assembly members when the total population was only 92,000 people. The Assembly then quickly expanded to 63 members in 1852 when the state’s population was passing 150,000. Then in 1854 the Assembly was last expanded to our present 80 members because California’s population had reached 207,000. But since the population is now over 38,000,000 ( 38 million ) Warnken and other plaintiffs demand the Assembly size be expanded to reestablish more realistic and genuinely representative districts.
Warnken’s brief is considered very scholarly by a variety of political science and jurisprudence authorities from the left and the right, conservative and liberal alike. His documentation includes charts and graphs full of such imperical data as the fact that in the past four State Assembly elections, not a single incumbent has lost office; this despite unprecedented crisis on every hand.
Essentially, Warnken says, “We’re in the pickle we’re in precisely because there has not been any really meaningful oversight from Sacramento. It’s impossible for 80 elected officials to oversee anything, let alone the hundreds of bureaus and branches of this largest of US jurisdictions.”
Warnken can be reached for comment:
by phone at: ( 805 ) 705-4177
by web browser at: http://www.californiacommonwealth.com
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