Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments 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, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist