Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of 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 unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, 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 confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats 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 critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist