Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire 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 U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned 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 never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives 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 government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer