Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; 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 alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US 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 – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’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 stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer