Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care 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 congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something 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 opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer