Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed 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 critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic 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 redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – 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 elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized 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 find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist