Ought Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist