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

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn 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 democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations 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