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

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people 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 continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California 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 ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism 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 budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer