Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, 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 simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist