Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: 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 independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’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. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist