Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate 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 distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight 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 practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer