Ought Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’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 special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist