Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist