Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted 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 too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.
And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)
The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.
If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist
