Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist