Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.
It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.
If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
