Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass 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 are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.
And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.
If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer