Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital 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 politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist