Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts 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. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure 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 years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. 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 fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer