Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer