Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge 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 shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist