Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited 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 Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist