Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist