Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver 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. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist