Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something 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 fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer