Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era 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 California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer