Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. 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 transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist