Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize 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 initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary 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 sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology 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 the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist