Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections 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 reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument 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 valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee 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 years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer