Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer