Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist