Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter 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 antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer