Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body 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 embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled 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, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, 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 power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members 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