Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once 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 legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist