Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.
And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?
How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)
The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.
It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist