Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist