Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; 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 presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; 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 become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality 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 the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist