Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question 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 deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist