Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast 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 Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer