Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.
If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US writer
