Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist