Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?
What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.
If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
