Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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 body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer