Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?
What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.
And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)
The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right 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 antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.
The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
