Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. 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 reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer