Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation 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 attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. 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 unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors 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