Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer