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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument 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 valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer