Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five 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 Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, 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 worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress 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 authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer