Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say 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 steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer