Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 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 special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; 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 attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer