Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy 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 critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer