Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer