Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist