Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, 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 maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave 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 not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required 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 other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist