Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern 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 ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.
If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a news outlet writer
