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

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist