Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas'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, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution 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 special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s 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 likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer