Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors 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