Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist