Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer