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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding 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 recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer