Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)
The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.
If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates 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
