Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.
And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction 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, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.
If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US columnist
