Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries 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 seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system 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 conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer