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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not 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 convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront 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 true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. 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 transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist