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

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era 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 new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer