Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed 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 government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle 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