Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument 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 worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, 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 melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist