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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer