Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. 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 keeps on operating smoothly.

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 boundaries that guarantee long-term positions 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 other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer