Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.
And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality 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 situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved 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 inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US writer
