Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. 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 uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help 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 Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)
The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn 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, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: 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 strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US writer
