Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?
What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.
If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member 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 give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
