Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar 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 the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle 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 strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.
If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer
