Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process 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 provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist