Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.
The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, California’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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle 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 lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer
