Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s 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 California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is 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 fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant 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 additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer