Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created 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 representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, 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 the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer