Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members 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 examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist