Ought Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct 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