Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly 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 additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument 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 worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.
If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, 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 probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a news outlet writer
