Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.
The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give 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 Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)
The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge 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 absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once 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 lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates 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
