Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.
And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed
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 attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)
The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.
If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a news outlet columnist
