Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur 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 made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer