Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 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 the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)
The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.
If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer
