Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.
And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.
The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state 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 opposing it has made us.
If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a news outlet columnist
