Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?
What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.
And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term 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 redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)
The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
