Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality 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 aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist