Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer