Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, 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 targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.
If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a news outlet writer