Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist