Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.
The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)
The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.
It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.
If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a news outlet columnist
