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

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. 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 House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer