Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic 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 retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a news outlet writer
