Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer