Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer