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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 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 voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s 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 the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist