Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled 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 long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, 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 debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer