Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government 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 little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.
And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled 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 nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)
The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far 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 lament what fighting it has transformed us into.
If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members 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 era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a news outlet columnist
