Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more 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; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?
How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to 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 measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)
The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government 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 institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US columnist
