Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?
What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)
The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.
The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.
If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
The columnist is a news outlet columnist
