Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, 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 operating smoothly.

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 body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer