Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after 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 does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist