Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments 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 create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions 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 other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight 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 reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer