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

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital 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 claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer