Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas'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 determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely 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 approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer