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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide 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 attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy 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 initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’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 a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions 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.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist