Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices 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 party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become 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 sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after 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 practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist