Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide 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 California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: 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 steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist