Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist
