Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. 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 made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer