Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning 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 initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
