Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate 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 provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist