Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process 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 objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer