Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize 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 first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer