Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington 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 Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing 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 select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist