Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer