Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist