Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer