Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer