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

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; 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 become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, 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 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer