Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people 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 continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far 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 reality have legislative, military 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 aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer