Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard 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 years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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 the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance 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 vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer