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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer