Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all 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 has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn 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 democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist