Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard 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 years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds 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 deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer