Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer