Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost 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 increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. 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 operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure 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 critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist