Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned 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 House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer