Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term 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 in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer