Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states 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 feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)
The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US columnist
