Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)
The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering 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 necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
