Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a news outlet columnist
